Changing of the Guard at ‘Inside Higher Ed’

Twenty years ago this fall, the higher education media landscape was a one-horse town. It started and stopped with The Chronicle of Higher Education. As editors there, Scott Jaschik and I had ideas about how The Chronicle might respond to the dramatic changes that were unfolding in the journalism business, but its leaders didn’t agree, and we left in May 2003.

Scott and I, along with our business colleague Kathlene Collins, had a vision of creating a higher education trade publication for the 21st century: high-quality, independent, digital-first/only and broadly accessible—meaning free to read. We set out to persuade major media companies and, when that failed, private investors that the world needed our idea, and by late 2004, Inside Higher Ed was close to becoming a reality.

That December, Inside Higher Ed started with stories Scott and I wrote from the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting (about things like the rights of part-time English professors and the convention’s best parties). In the years since, Inside Higher Ed has published more than 85,000 news, opinion and other articles by a couple generations of talented reporters, editors and outside contributors for an audience of more than two million people a month.

I could not be prouder of the hard questions we’ve asked and the stories we’ve broken, the issues we’ve helped people understand, the experimentation we’ve encouraged, the community of professionals we’ve created and the colleges, companies and nonprofit organizations we’ve helped hire employees and market to our audience. Not everything has gone as we drew it up, but Inside Higher Ed has more than lived up to our goal of becoming an essential part of the higher ed landscape.

I’ve decided to end my own run at Inside Higher Ed in December after a nice, round 20 years. A deliberate period of succession planning has put Inside Higher Ed very purposefully in excellent hands (including Sara Custer as editor in chief), and the company’s talented and dedicated journalists, marketers, technologists and salespeople will keep carrying out its multiple missions.

After spending the last 35-plus years analyzing and assessing higher ed, I’m looking forward to a next career chapter, where I can try to fix some of the problems I see in this industry I care so much about. I’m not sure exactly what form that work will take, but I'm excited by the opportunity; please tell me how I can help.

I’m honored to have played a role in creating Inside Higher Ed and to have worked alongside so many talented people. None of what we’ve done would have been possible without all of you—Inside Higher Ed’s readers, sources, advertisers, supporters and, yes, critics. You’ve pushed us to do our best work, cheered us when we have, and challenged us when we haven’t.

Please keep doing all those things going forward: Inside Higher Ed needs your readership, your scrutiny and your passion.

—Doug