A clutch of recent media stories about higher education are kind of irritating me.  Specifically, it’s the media credulity on display which is so disheartening.

One major source of irritation has to do with stories which get written when a professor is suspended or dismissed. We’ve had two of these recently, one in Nova Scotia and one in BC.

The one in Nova Scotia concerned Psychology professor (what the hell is it with Canadian psychology profs, anyway?)  Rick Mehta, who was suspended from Acadia last January and then dismissed last month.  The dominant framing of the story – for instance, like this one which ran in The Globe and Mail, (written by a CP reporter because the Globe can’t get its act together to hire a full-time beat reporter to replace Simona Chiose) was ‘professor says controversial things, professor gets fired, obviously it’s a freaking free speech issue.’  Which, of course, is what all the usual suspects want you to think.

The problem is, in this particular case, it’s a long way from the truth.  Mehta was actually fired for i) totally ignoring the curriculum of his own courses, ii) not only outing a rape survivor but pointing his twitter followers to a dropbox containing an audio recording of the student recounting her story (without permission, natch) and refusing to take it down when asked ii) other episodes of bullying students.  And though Acadia did not initially elaborate on the details of the case publicly (not surprising given it was still under arbitration) anyone with minimal twitter search skills could have found all this out.  But no, we got the dumb-ass syllogism ‘prof is outspoken, prof got fired, prof must have been fired because he was outspoken.’

(As journalist Stephen Kimber points out in his blog over here, Acadia in fact did muddy the waters somewhat by firing him for all of that *and* for things “like damaging the reputation of the university”, which is one of those things that actually is covered by academic freedom.   But the point is this was a long way from a straightforward “big-bad-university-bullying-truth-telling-prof” story).

This isn’t the only such story from the summer.  The Vancouver Sun made a concerted effort to tell a similar story about Derek Pyne, a prof at Thompson Rivers University.  Pyne had done some interesting work on predatory journals in academia and asked pointed questions about the role of universities themselves in this enterprise, claiming that a majority of senior staff at his own Business School had published in such journals.  He even got a favourable mention in the Economist for this work.  And then suddenly he was suspended without pay.  The Sun, of course, immediately went into dumb-ass syllogism mode: “he made accusations, and was suspended – therefore the suspension must be the result of accusations!” and the story made the twitter rounds accompanied by a great deal of tut-tutting.

Now, I have no idea what actually happened at TRU, but I am willing to bet good money the Sun’s story is not the whole story.  If Pyne’s only fault was to have published something the university didn’t like, he and his union would presumably be blasting TRU in public all day every day.  But neither Pyne nor the union agreed to comment for the Sun story, which makes me suspect very strongly that something else was at the root of the suspension.

Shifting gears, another source of incredibly irritating media stories about PSE are stories that uncritically report absolutely outlandish stats about the sector without giving them even a basic sniff test.  For instance, the Toronto Star piece reporting on a Forum poll (Danger! Danger Will Robinson!) on student debt, which was totally preposterous but it made for a great headline (LGBTQ Students Saddled With More Debt, Poll Shows).

Here’s just a few of the things that a data-literate newspaper might have picked up on from Forum’s press release rather than just running with the story uncritically:

• The sample for the poll is described as 1163 Canadians 16 or older who attended a post-secondary institution.  But it does not say when they attended.  My read is it’s everyone who is in their normal omnibus, which means they could be surveying people who graduates in the 1960s. This renders the results meaningless.
• If you look at the percentage reporting debt from their studies, it appears to be 100% which would be remarkable since no study I’m aware of has even put the debt figure higher than 65% (and more recent surveys show it somewhat lower than that).  So, either this is an extremely biased sample, or in fact debt was an unacknowledged sampling criteria.  Either way: this should have sent up huge warning flares.
• Debt for all post-secondary education is mashed together.  Which is bananas.  Every reputable study of debt in Canada distinguishes between college debt and university debt because the programs are of different length.

Now, given all that, if someone shows you data suggesting that LGBTQ students have more debt than others you may want to ask: “is this true, holding date of graduation constant”? Thirteen percent of under 44s in the survey self-described as LGBTQ compared to only 6% of the 45+, which suggests there may be cohort effects at work.  You might also want to ask, “is it true holding type of institution constant”?  If LGBTQ students are more likely to attend university than college then presumably that would explain the matter entirely.

But of course, the Star asked none of those questions.  Just another example of this country’s absolutely abysmal state of PSE reporting.