Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2006
OVER THE YEARS
Philip W. Semas, who is now editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, joined the Chronicle staff in 1969 after working as a California stringer for the paper. He and other longtime colleagues say that they intended to spend a few years at the paper and then move on to other newspapers, but there always seemed something new on the horizon, opportunities and exciting projects, so they never left.
A relatively recent graduate of the journalism school at the University of Oregon when he became a reporter at the paper, Semas says, “One reason people stay here a long time is the emphasis on quality and doing the best possible job we can.” He says his biggest story as a reporter was the aftermath of the shootings at Kent State in 1970, and he remembers when the Scranton Commission was appointed to investigate the Kent shootings and the Chronicle published the full text of the report.
“It was our largest issue yet, with 24 pages,” Semas says. “In those days things didn’t get published as fast and there was no Internet, so for several weeks, if not several months, the only place you could get the full text was in the Chronicle.” They printed extra issues to meet demand and, Semas notes, it “helped establish us to a broader audience.”
As an editor, he remembers the Bakke decision3 as a big highlight. “It was handed down on our deadline day, but we still managed to do a full report, including publishing more of the text of the decision than The New York Times did.” Another highlight for Semas in his editorial career was launching the Chronicle’s companion paper, The Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Gwaltney’s own vision and personality are also credited among the reasons that Chronicle reporters often choose to stay at the paper rather than moving on. “Corbin is incredibly creative and imaginative and a pleasure to work with,” says Malcolm Scully, who came on board in 1967 and now is editor of The Chronicle Review. “He has very high standards and a playful and creative mind. You always feel like you are being stimulated when you work with him.” Scully, who has an English degree from the University of Virginia and a masters degree from Cornell University, remembers the early days of publishing the paper when the small staff did everything from copy editing and writing to occasionally driving from Baltimore to York, Pennsylvania, to deliver the Chronicle’s pages to the printer on time.
Though 6' 5'', Scully remembers cracking his head on the low ceilings in the basement quarters that the Chronicle rented from Johns Hopkins. He says, “It truly was a very exciting place. We were just getting started and there was a sense of adventure because we didn’t know if we were going to make it. Our timing was very good, though, because there was a lot of foment on campuses in the late 60s and early 70s, and we covered front-page news at a level of depth that got a lot of attention from daily newspapers.”
Scully has held a variety of jobs at the paper, none more fun, he says, than that of founding editor of the international section for which he recruited the first overseas stringers, including Elizabeth MacCallum, who was married to the Toronto Globe and Mail correspondent in Beijing and thus living in China. To get MacCallum’s reports in the days before e-mail, Scully drove to Dulles International Airport to walk her packages through customs. In 1978, he traveled to South Africa to report on apartheid and in 1986, he and reporter Paul Desruisseaux visited 15-20 universities in South Africa to report on happenings in higher education. “Those were really heady days for us,” he says of his first decades at the paper.
Edward (Ted) R. Weidlein, who began as a Chronicle reporter 34 years ago, with a degree from Princeton University and experience as managing editor of the Daily Princetonian and, after graduation, as a member of the university’s admissions team, also has many memories of headline stories. “I remember getting a call to take the first plane down to Baton Rouge in November 1972, where the Southern University campus had a protest and four students were killed by police,” Weidlein says. “I did a major story on that. In fact we ripped up most of the paper that week—at that point it was only eight pages. It was a highlight of my reporting career.”
Weidlein has held many other Chronicle posts, including that of founder of the opinion section and of Books & Arts, which was a critical success but could not sustain itself when spun off from the parent paper. In the 1980s, he began exploring how the Chronicle could use technological advances and helped get its web site started in the 1990s.
In 1978, the Chronicle was purchased from EPE4 by Gwaltney and Jack Crowl, a colleague. Later, when Crowl moved to Vermont and formed his own publishing company, Gwaltney purchased Crowl’s interest in the paper.
Looking at the range of topics that have been covered by the Chronicle in the nearly four decades since it came on the scene, Daniel Fallon says, “The Chronicle of Higher Education quickly proved its value in a whole variety of ways: through the dissemination of scholarship, for instance, and through regular reporting on issues of importance for the cultural norms of the enterprise. An example is when ethical questions arose regarding issues relating to sexual harassment or dating and intimate and personal relationships between advisors and students, or between students and students and others on campus. All of those issues tended to be developed almost exclusively in local contexts, but because they were rapidly reported in the Chronicle, they took on a normative character, quickly becoming matters that people were familiar with and were able to deal with in terms of a common language that facilitated the development of cultural norms.”
3 In the case of the Regents of the University of California v Bakke, in 1978 the Supreme Court ruled that Allan Bakke, a white man, had been illegally denied admission to the university’s medical school, which had admitted black candidates with weaker academic credentials, but also that medical schools were entitled to consider race as a factor in admissions. The Court thus upheld the general principle of affirmative action.
4 With the funds realized from the sale of The Chronicle of Higher Education, EPE was able to begin publishing Education Week in 1981. Prior to that, Carnegie Corporation had provided money for a feasibility study for the publication. In September 1989, EPE launched Teacher Magazine.