Way back in the day, in 1997, to be precise, the New Yorker ran an article by James Traub on the University of Phoenix, not too kindly entitled “Drive-Thru U.: Higher Education for People Who Mean Business (The Next University).” Well, what a difference a decade (and a half) makes. Earlier this year, Harold Ross’ creation combined with the Phoenix Philistines to put on a panel discussion grandly titled “A Conversation on the Future of Education in America,” featuring such NEA/AFT bashing types as Cynthia Brown and Margaret Spellings, which was promoted in a two-page ad in the New Yorker, paid for by the university. After the “conversation” was over, the university ran a four-page “advertorial” in the New Yorker boasting about the event.
The cream of the jest—some of it, anyway—is that this outrage was covered, not by the New York Times, or the Columbia Journalism Review, or other guardians of journalistic virtue, but, largely, by angry defenders of teachers’ unions, still seething at the New Yorker’s “lurid screed”* about New York City’s now notorious “Rubber Room,” where incompetent teachers collect their pay and play video games while running out the clock on their grossly unproductive careers.
I’ve written before about the New Yorker’s less than perfect record when it comes to resisting the pull of the almighty buck, including its painful weakness for advertorials, but this is worst one ever—at least, the worst one I’ve ever heard of. Hat tip to not always my favorite neo-liberal, Charles “Mr. Crankypants” Peters.
*”Lurid” as in “totally accurate.”
