This week we’re bringing back e-Literate LIVE! fan favorite Doug Lederman, co-Founder and Editor of Inside Higher Ed, for our Blursday Social chat.
As usual, we can talk about whatever you want. Personally, I’m interested to hear Doug’s thoughts on what the (hopefully) first post-pandemic academic year will be like. But just about anything higher education-related crosses Doug’s desk, so everything is fair game.
RSVP for this Blursday, 2/18 from 4 PM to 5:30 PM ET.
BYOB.
One year ago I wrote a post critical of Inside Higher Ed for not doing a blanket disclosure about the sale of a majority stake to a private equity firm with other education holdings (most notably Ruffalo Noel Levitz).
Subsequent to the disclosure from the Huffington Post, IHE put up an ownership statement disclosing the ownership change and calling out that only editors are involved in editorial policies. The About Us page prominently links to this ownership statement.
In an interview with Education Dive, Scott Jaschik (an Inside Higher Ed founder and editor) noted his regret for not disclosing the sale up front while concluding:
“I guess I would just say to anyone who has questions, read us and read our coverage and call me if you think we’re doing anything that we shouldn’t,” [Jaschik] said.
In the past year I have done exactly that – watching carefully for editorial shifts, complaining publicly about one article, and privately emailing Jaschik on another issue.
My conclusion? Inside Higher Ed has shown no bias and no change in editorial policies based on the new ownership – they are living up to their word. IHE [Jaschik in particular] has also been quite good in discussing any questions or issues based on their coverage. IHE should be commended for their quality coverage of higher education news.
Update 1/21: See link and blurb at bottom of post from new Editor’s Note at Inside Higher Ed.
Last week the Huffington Post ran an article by David Halperin breaking the news that the private equity firm Quad Partners had acquired a controlling interest in Inside Higher Ed.
Quad Partners, a New York private equity firm that is invested heavily in the for-profit college industry, and whose founder has aggressively opposed regulation of that troubled industry, has acquired a controlling stake in the respected trade publication Inside Higher Ed (IHE), which often reports on for-profit colleges and the policy disputes surrounding them. There has been no public announcement, but the Quad Partners website now lists Inside Higher Ed as one of its investments, among a range of education-related companies, including for-profit trade schools Beckfield College, Blue Cliff College, Dorsey Schools, Pacific College of Oriental Medicine, and Marinello Schools of Beauty.
Doug Lederman, one of IHE’s two top editors, confirmed to me that Quad purchased a majority interest in IHE in November.
Quad Partner James Tieng is now an IHE board member. Quad also owns the influential college admissions management company Noel-Levitz and other education technology companies that contract with colleges and universities — another sector that IHE covers.
The rest of the article then goes full conspiracy theory, building off the for-profit connection of both Quad Partners and its founder. Halperin seems to believe mere indirect association with for-profits is evil and compromising in and of itself rather than finding any changes or compromises in IHE coverage.
The bigger issue in my mind was described by Keith Button at Education Dive.
While the list of potential conflicts of interest in such a sale is long, the fact that the deal wasn’t announced and the potential news coverage issues weren’t publicly addressed up-front raises more questions.
The other day, I wrote a post about community-negotiated focus and how we want e-Literate TV to be a kind of “choose your own adventure in ed tech” experience, both for individuals and for campus communities. You can get a sense of how we’re trying to do that in the first series with Phil’s interview of Inside Higher Education Editors Doug Lederman and Scott Jaschik. They talk about the changing landscape of education, why different topics in educational technology come up in the first place, and how the ways in which those topics are raised can have either a positive or a negative impact. This is the anchor episode for the series and is intended to provoke discussion that would lead to the group finding a focus in their collaborative ed tech investigation that’s important to them.
