IS ALMA MATER A SACRED COW?

When I worked at The Des Moines Register fourteen years ago. I had virtual carte blanche to initiate investigations. I can remember only one occasion when a proposal of mine met with an unenthusiastic reception -- when I wanted to delve into Drake University, located about two miles from the newsroom.

Drake was Des Moines' intellectual center, as well as one of its largest employers. Numerous Register newsies taught there as adjunct professors (myself included). Yet in the huge Register newsroom, nobody covered the university as a beat. Intercollegiate athletics was covered by the sports desk; otherwise, Drake's appearances in the newspaper consisted mainly of rewritten news releases about student and faculty accomplishments, or spot stories about what some speaker said the night before.

Today, the Register, a first-rate newspaper with investigative zeal, still has no separate Drake University beat. There is a higher-education reporter, but his responsibilities are statewide. He covers meetings more than he covers issues or ideas.

Currently, I teach part-time at a large state university, where over the years I have seen waste, incompetence, and selfishness, with occasional fraud mixed in. I've also seen superb teaching, research, and community service. But stories, negative or positive, about these topics rarely get written.

What's going on here? Almost every newsroom is near a junior college or university campus. Almost every readerand viewer has attended that campus as a student or would like to or know ssomebody who does; has worked there or would like to or knows somebody who does; pays taxes to support it -- maybe all the above.

Yet few news organizations have higher-education beat reporters. According to Lisa Walker, executive director of the Education Writers Association, only about twenty-five of its members cover higher education on a regular basis. Of that minuscule number, most work for large daily newspapers. Some are free-lancers. Only one is a broadcast journalist.

What coverage there is tends to be based on news releases and superficial telephone interviews. Meanwhile, the untouched stories are the stuff of investigative reporting: athletic programs thatrecruit youngsters who are not scholars and in fact never graduate; faculty members drawing large salaries while teaching indifferently or relying on graduate assistants; trustees approving contracts for buildings and services that aid friends and business associates; closed-door tenure and promotion committees that treat women and members of minority groups shabbily, as well as discriminating against faculty members of any color or gender who prefer teaching to research; university housing for students that is unsanitary or unsafe; failure to achieve racial diversity, as a lower percentage of blacks attend college even as a higher percentage of blacks graduate from high school; huge annual tuition increases that often are as much the result of bureaucratic inefficiency as inflation; acceptance of corporate funding foresearch projects that not so coincidentally end up buttressing the goals of the donor.

Some reasons for missed coverage of these and more positive stories are easy to identify -- lack of initiative and lack of imagination. Those failings are, unfortunately, common to many beats in many news organizations. Possibly another, less obvious factor may help explain the failure to investigate campuses. Unlike the majority of the population, most reporters and editors aregraduates of four-year universities. They generally value their degreees, and have fond memories of campus life. In their minds, universities are hallowed, somewhat fusty institutions working for the greater good. So why not leave alma mater and her sisters on their pedestal while going after society's more venal institutions?

A SOURCE GUIDE

Journalists wanting to write well about higher education have many sources to turn to for ideas that can be localized. An obvious source is the Education Writers Association in Washington, D.C. Another is a comparative newcomer -- the two-year-old Lingua Franca, a bimonthly magazine based in Mamaroneck, New York, devoted entirely to higher education.

One source, however, stands out for its accessibility and its attempt to be comprehensive -- the Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C.

I have been reading the Chronicle foryears; every week I clip articles that provide ideas for stories to undertake or background for stories under way. In the week I was writing this piece, I clipped stories with these headlines:

SCIENTISTS BEGIN TO QUESTION CONFIDENTIALITY OF FRAUD INVESTIGATIONS; CLAIMS OF AMERICAN-INDIAN HERITAGE BECOME ISSUE FOR COLLEGES SEEKING TO DIVERSIFY ENROLLMENTS; DOES EDUCATION ACT OFFER AN UNDESERVED BONANZA OR A DISAPPOINTMENT TO MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES? -- A CLASSIC DEBATERAGES: SOME OBSERVERS WARN THAT LOW-INCOME FAMILIES WILL BE THE LOSERS; FEMINIST SCHOLARS ASK WHETHER THEIR SPARRING MARKSHEALTHY DEBATE OR A SPLINTERING 'CATFIGHT.'

In addition, the Chronicle publishes annual national surveys on faculty and administrators' salaries, graduation rats of athletes and non-athletes, and campus-specific pork barrel projects approved by Congress.

It takes little imagination to see how any of those stories could be localized. Now, if only more newspapers, magazines, and broadcast stations assigned somebody to do the localizing.

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