The Chronicle: Career Network: 05/24/2002

Not all reporters come at you with an ideological agenda. In some cases the agenda is more personal. This is certainly true of those higher-education beat reporters who either washed out of graduate school, or got the Ph.D. but never got a job, or got a job but it didn't work out. Like Milton, who always felt that he had been "church-outed by the Prelates," these would-be or failed academics spend much of their lives trying to prove that they were too good for the institution that could not find a place for them. They love to write stories showing the foolishness that has taken over the academy since they were excluded from it. They love to paint a picture of education having gone astray, of overpriced professors worshiping false foreign (usually French) gods, of students betrayed when their teachers forsake the "basics" in favor of texts that are studied only because they were written by someone who has been oppressed. And they love to write that story again and again, living out a compulsion for repetition that has its source in a trauma they cannot leave behind.