Media Musings: Higher education needs hope
It’s difficult to untangle how it all began. It could have been sources making off-the-record telephone calls to investigative reporters like Channel 5’s Phil Williams or reporters in Knoxville who relentlessly cover the empire the University of Tennessee is, one that stretches from the mountains to the bluff. It could have been offended members of faculty and administration who saw the smooth arrogance of the dethroned president, John Shumaker.
Investigative reporting is considered the most important role modern journalism plays and its reporters have great patience as they build “the golden Rolodex” of reliable sources that will talk but never for attribution.They are protected by these specialized reporters because they would be fired or worthless after their cover is lifted.
Certainly, this takes nothing away from the reporters, who live with the disappointment of digging dry wells and fear that sources are manipulating them for personal gain or revenge for some sleight, real or imagined. That’s why the old two-source rule is usually in play, where editors demand two sources on highly sensitive stories. Single source stories are used, but there is usually written documents or tape recordings to support the lone “leaker’s” information.
From press accounts, it appears Shumaker was UT’s “dream candidate”, a rainmaker who could bring hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the UT Foundation, itself a group most unwilling to talk about its deals for private property or a new airplane for the university’s top brass. Shumaker was dazzling, to be sure, but he was also very willing to use a very compliant press in publicly demanding more public monies and ignoring the fact the fund raising at UT is among the most successful in the nation. Modesty wasn’t his middle name.
The problem here rests in the highly superficial, surface coverage given to public higher education in Tennessee. I will still argue the best coverage given locally was done by Frank Sutherland at The Tennessean, who’s now the top news editor at the paper. Michael Cass has done good work for the paper covering education, but what is needed is a consistent coverage of the issues facing higher education, not the very least being that the state doesn’t care about higher education.
Here’s the point: higher education holds the key to the occupations of the future. Yet, sadly, only 17 percent of the state’s working population holds a college degree. If we are to have the research parks MTSU and UT want and need, if we are to generate more knowledge based on the techno-world of tomorrow, we have to have the newspapers go beyond the one-day story.
Vanderbilt President Gordon Gee has shown his serious commitment to breaking that university’s elitist image by traveling the state with his faculty and staff to learn of Tennessee, and by building bridges to Fisk and Belmont. But he has huge endowments and national reputation and yes, they go together.
For over a decade, the public purse has been closed to the state’s higher education leaders. It can be hoped that with a gifted governor, a press willing to extend itself to better coverage, and a legislature willing to lead rather than react to talk radio, we can build a better tomorrow in what Shumaker’s ex-wife called “a hillbilly” state.
(Ed Kimbrell is a professor in MTSU’s School of Journalism.)