academy's fallen idols, The

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Fall 2001 by Drutchas, Gillian A

For many years, Joseph Ellis's class on The Vietnam War and American Culture was one of Mount Holyoke College's most popular, thanks partly to his vivid depictions of his personal experiences in Vietnam.

When Ellis won the Pulitzer Prize in April 2001, students and colleagues at the 165-year-old women's college in South Hadley, Mass. couldn't have been prouder. But all that pride quickly evaporated on June 18, 2001, when the Boston Globe revealed that the closest Ellis had come to fighting in Vietnam was a history class at West Point. Ellis offered apologies, and Mount Holyoke, after much delay, launched an investigation. In August, the college suspended Ellis for one year without pay.

The scandal, broken by good old-fashioned investigative journalism, touched off a media feeding frenzy. By August, the Globe had published more than a dozen articles on the scandal. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine and U.S. News and World Report had also covered the story. While some journalists and academics expressed outrage at Ellis's fabrications, others rushed to his defense.

Moreover, the professor's story served to underscore some hard truths about higher education's relationship with the media and about the pressures on faculty in an age of edutainment.

Kindred spirits

In a May 1998 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Can News Organizations and Universities Ever Hope to Understand Each Other," C. Peter Magrath, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, drew comparisons between higher education and the media, noting that both champion the First Amendment, both feel it is their responsibility to challenge popular and accepted ideas, and both dislike being managed by outside forces or, for that matter, by their own employers.

Yet despite these striking similarities, academia and the media seem constantly at odds. Professors complain that reporters oversimplify and skew complex issues-with damaging results. After a PBS Frontline report cast doubt on Don Cardinal's research into treating autism, the Chapman University professor received dozens of phone calls from reporters. In a 1994 article in the Chronicle, Cardinal lamented that the media was guilty of "passing judgment on the research without taking time to understand its complexity," and concluded that "the media frequently want a simple answer, demanding consensus where it doesn't exist."

Magrath was more blunt. Academics see reporters as "scandalmongers motivated by an urge to sell papers or win viewers at any cost," he wrote in his Chronicle essay.

Still, the Globe's Walter V. Robinson, who broke the Ellis story, does not seem to fit that description. Quoted in the Globe's "Ombudsman" column, where the paper explores editorial questions raised by readers, Robinson said the Ellis story left him "tired, empty and sad," but felt that it was a story that had to be written. "There's no satisfaction at all in his plight," Robinson told Ombudsman columnist Jack Thomas. "If there's any satisfaction at all, it's in the conviction we did the right thing, and even though initially, there was public sentiment against us, I think people now believe the story had to be written, that integrity in the classroom is important."

Crisis points

Stories like the Ellis one also highlight the challenges colleges face when dealing with negative publicity. Following the first Ellis story, almost a week passed before anyone at Mount Holyoke made any public comment. When President Joanne Creighton finally released a statement to the Globe, she lamented that she was "dismayed to learn about the issue from the press," and in a separate letter to the Mount Holyoke community resolved to "deal with it in our own community."

One suburban Boston public relations specialists notes: "I remember reading the president's quotes and thinking, `this sounds more like a real estate developer than a college president who's supposed to stand for free inquiry.'"

Ellis himself had little to say to the media about the issue following an initial written statement to the Globe apologizing for "having let stand and later confirming the assumption that I went to Vietnam and any other distortions about my personal life."

The whole affair seemed to reconfirm the fact that college media relations offices are more accustomed to churning out news releases on research grants and new majors than handling crisis. Says Boston crisis communication specialist Hank Shafran: "People in colleges who make the decisions are generally people who don't know how to deal with a crisis."

An academic tradition

Joseph Ellis was by no means the first academic to cross some line of academic integrity-nor was he the first to be caught by the media. (He's not even the first to lie about serving in Vietnam. In July, the Chronicle reported that professors Larry E. Cable of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and William T. Whitely of the University of Oklahoma lied about their experiences in Vietnam too.)