Carnegie Corporation support for the Chronicle began with a 1965 two-year grant of $120,000 and continued with a second two-year grant of $100,000 awarded in 1967. Two years later the Ford Foundation awarded the Chronicle a $300,000 grant. In 1968, the Corporation also provided a small grant for “Subscriptions to The Chronicle of Higher Education for selected Commonwealth universities”² and a 1973 grant of $152,000 for expanding the newspaper.

Gwaltney, who was considering how the Chronicle could become financially independent, noted that an education supplement of The Times of London ran a great deal of recruitment advertising because British law required that education job openings be advertised. “If that could happen in this country, that would solve all our problems financially,” he mused. When the affirmative action and equal employment legislation was passed in the United States, Gwaltney says, “We were ready to become the medium for higher education to advertise its job openings, so that solved our financial problems.”

The paper published its first classified advertisements in March 1970 and the first display ads a few months later in September. By then, circulation had climbed to more than 20,000 subscribers and the $15 subscription price bought 38 issues a year. The advertisements proved to be of value in more ways than one. “For people who were interested in pursuing administrative careers, there was no alternative to The Chronicle of Higher Education,” says Daniel Fallon, chair of Carnegie Corporation’s Education Division. “You would have to advertise there if you were conducting a search, and if you were an aspirant, you quickly turned to those pages to determine what the field was looking like and what the market was like. The advertisements also brought loyal readers.”

By October 1971, the Chronicle had increased its subscribers by about 25 percent, to 24,500. By then there were 20 staff members, a figure that indicated any lingering concerns about there being sufficient news to publish a paper devoted to the academic world were unfounded: there was plenty of news, and the paper was a critical success from the start, with some people referring to it as the Wall Street Journal of higher education. “The Chronicle went beyond our expectations,” recalls Mahoney, who later became president of The Commonwealth Fund and who is currently president of MEM Associates, Inc. “Advertising allowed it to become self-sufficient. They were very clever to get that going early.”

The early days of the Chronicle also provided some interesting memories. Gwaltney, for example, recalls a memorable elevator ride on one of his first visits to the offices of Carnegie Corporation. “We were kind of a rollicking group, just a bunch of young kids, and we were on the elevator and were all yakking it up,” he says. As they approached the floor on which the Corporation’s offices were located, one member of Gwaltney’s group said “I guess we have to be serious now.” When he heard that, Gwaltney says, “I cringed, because I recognized the other person on the elevator as John Gardner, who was the head of the foundation.” But everything turned out well and, continues Gwaltney, “Later I wondered if maybe that helped us to get the grant—that we were human beings, not stuffy people.”

Gwaltney says he wanted to be a journalist from the time he was a child living in Baltimore; his first newspaper publishing experience involved writing his own small paper on a Royal Number 10 typewriter given to him by his grandfather when he was five years old. An admirer of National Geographic, eight-year old Gwaltney later published his own homemade version of that magazine with stories about places in Washington, D.C., including one article about the 1932 opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library. He took photos with a Brownie camera and hand-pasted them into the paper. One influence he remembers is Richie of the News, a book by Ralph Henry Barbour, a story about a reporter named Richie, who had great principles and, Gwaltney says, was pitted against a sleazy publisher in the same small town. He is still seeking a copy of the book.

His first newspaper job was at the Baltimore News-Post. In 1943, his love of publishing took a turn when he invested his limited savings to develop a mockup for Johns Hopkins Magazine that upgraded the vision of an alumni magazine to one that featured photographs as well as educational articles, not just dry information about campus life and fundraising. His intuition regarding a new type of alumni magazine proved to be on target, and the Hopkins magazine became a model for alumni magazines at colleges across the country.

2 Under the terms of the gift made by Andrew Carnegie to create Carnegie Corporation of New York, grants must benefit the people of the United States, although up to 7.4 percent of the funds may be used for the same purpose in countries that are or have been members of the British Commonwealth. The Corporation’s current Commonwealth focus is on selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

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