Corbin Gwaltney, Founder of ‘The Chronicle of Higher Education,’ Dies at 97
Chronicle EditorsJuly 29, 2019
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Corbin Gwaltney, the pioneering editor who founded The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1966 and later The Chronicle of Philanthropy, died on July 29. He was 97, and had remained active in overseeing the two publications well into his 90s.
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Corbin Gwaltney, the pioneering editor who founded The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1966 and later The Chronicle of Philanthropy, died on July 29. He was 97, and had remained active in overseeing the two publications well into his 90s.
Gwaltney, once an alumni-magazine editor at the Johns Hopkins University, began The Chronicle as an eight-page broadsheet designed to provide serious coverage of the nation’s colleges through excellent reporting and precise writing. The first issue was mailed to 5,000 subscribers; today The Chronicle serves millions of readers online and in print.
Fiercely independent and at times mercurial, Gwaltney was a newspaperman to his core who combined a sophisticated devotion to language and a designer’s love of fonts and photography as he built The Chronicles into the leading professional publications in their sectors. He was active as the top editor well into his 70s, and he continued to speak longingly about sitting in the editor’s chair until the end.
The first issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education was published in November 1966 at an opportune moment. The federal government was expanding its role in higher education. In the coming years, the draft and the escalation of the Vietnam War would stir protests on campuses around the country. Radical movements divided faculties and student groups as never before, while civil-rights demonstrations were met by police force. Many campuses experienced riots, bombings, shootings, and other forms of violence.
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Gwaltney and John A. Crowl, a partner in founding The Chronicle, were well positioned to seize the opportunity. The pair brought an intense interest in colleges and universities (often neglected by the daily press) together with the metabolism of newspaper reporters. They wanted to create a national publication that reported honestly and fairly about colleges, not one that would serve as a booster for higher education. As Gwaltney often remarked, it was The Chronicle of Higher Education, not The Chronicle for Higher Education.
Gwaltney was proudest of some of The Chronicle’s earliest accomplishments, particularly its coverage of the 1970 killings of four Kent State University students by members of the Ohio National Guard. He took pride as well in the coverage of international issues — apartheid in South Africa, the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the fate of the American University of Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war — as well as in high-profile science features (at different times, two staff members have reported from Antarctica).
But he was equally proud of publishing the full texts of important Supreme Court decisions; tables of data about salaries and enrollment; and lists of appointments, resignations, and new books. For years he read every word destined to be printed in the newspaper, approved all page designs and photo choices, and was the final arbiter of all grammar and style questions.
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The Chronicle began to expand in the late 1970s, buoyed by job advertising from colleges around the world. Over time, the paper added staff members to report on every corner of campus life: technology, the business of college athletics, the life of professors, intellectual currents. The publication provided continuing coverage about threats to academic freedom and about sexual and racial discrimination, and drew immediate complaints when it reported the salaries of college presidents.
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In later years, The Chronicle added a stand-alone opinion-and-ideas section, The Chronicle Review, as well as special supplements and in-depth reports. The company also acquired Arts & Letters Daily, a website that offers links to notable articles online.
Gwaltney was an American entrepreneur at heart, constantly looking to invent new publications or try innovative approaches with emerging technologies. His company was one of the first to use computers to set type. He grasped early on the powerful potential of the digital world, and his was one of the first media companies to publish online, in 1993, soon after the birth of the internet. He was also a savvy businessman, and he made sure The Chronicle erected a paywall to protect its valuable content while much of the publishing world chose to give away its online content free.
He also remained committed to making the company, The Chronicle of Higher Education Inc., a humane place to work. He created a culture in which employees were valued highly and treated well, where mutual respect and a commitment to integrity fostered excellent work, and where having fun was a good thing. As he wrote in the company’s credo: “Laughter is often heard in our offices.”
Born in Baltimore in 1922, Gwaltney graduated from Hopkins in 1943 and entered the U.S. Army as an infantryman. In December 1944, on the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, his unit was surrounded, and he ended up as a prisoner of war, an event that turned his hair a striking white, unusual for his age. As he recalled in a 2006 history of his time at The Chronicle, he “dreamed at night about food, cigarettes, and newspaper work.”
He had wanted to be a newspaperman since age 12, when he read a book called Ritchie of the News — “the story of a young newspaper editor,” Gwaltney recalled, “who held to his ideals in the face of pressure from advertisers, politicians, and an unscrupulous rival.”
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Back in Baltimore after the war’s end, Gwaltney went to work for Western Electric while tinkering with an idea for transforming the Hopkins alumni magazine from an unremarkable assemblage of campus reports and alumni notes to a publication with top-notch photography and in-depth features that would continue to instruct Hopkins graduates long after they had received their degrees. After winning the support of the provost, he went to work for the university and produced his first issue in 1950. By 1951, The Johns Hopkins Magazine was winning awards and beginning a sea change in how colleges thought about communicating with alumni.
In 1957, Gwaltney began working with other alumni-magazine editors on a project to pool some of their resources and produce content that would add context to what they were reporting about their own institutions, and that led him in 1959 to create Editorial Projects in Education. In 1964 the new organization won a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to begin producing a four-page newsletter, The E.P.E. 15-Minute Report, intended for college trustees.
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The Chronicle Of Higher Education - Origins
The newsletter was such a hit that two years later Gwaltney and his E.P.E. colleagues went back to Carnegie with a proposal for a newspaper to be published every other week. The first issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education was dated November 23, 1966, under a logo Gwaltney produced himself using transfer type purchased at a local art-supply store. The top headline, “Politics and Higher Education: The Picture Changes for ’67,” ran above a pair of stories, one with a Washington dateline and the other from Berkeley, Calif.
At first, the newspaper carried no advertising, but in 1970, after it became a weekly, the first three job ads appeared, along with the first display ads (initially the company’s business manager kept a log of them on a steno pad). The company’s big break came in 1972, when the federal government began requiring colleges that accepted federal funds to meet affirmative-action hiring standards. Job vacancies had to be advertised, and The Chronicle was quick to note that it was the ideal medium for such ads.
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Within a few years, advertising fueled so much revenue growth that Gwaltney and Crowl bought The Chronicle, in 1978, and established it as a profitable business. (In 1990, Crowl sold his share of the company to Gwaltney and retired to Vermont.)
As an editor and a business owner, Gwaltney was fiercely independent. He brooked not the slightest hint of interference in the papers’ coverage from advertisers — not even when a major advertiser withdrew its ads for several years, complaining about how it was being covered. Similarly, he resisted taking direction from reader surveys, believing that it was the editors’ job to discern what should be important to readers.
For years he compiled a column on Page 2, called “Marginalia,” that poked fun at poorly worded college announcements and the like, and that annually included a gleeful Christmas poem with stanzas like “Dance a holiday fandango / For Clarion State Coll at Venango, / And while we’re dancing, try a waltz / For SUNY’s College at New Paltz.” The column was signed with only his initials: “—C.G.”
Julia Schmalz for The Chronicle
In earlier years Gwaltney was sometimes quick to anger. In later years, the temper mellowed, leaving a resolute passion for what Gwaltney called The Chronicle: “The inanimate love of my life.”
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Gwaltney regularly came up with ideas for new publications or offerings. One had staying power: The Chronicle of Philanthropy, created in 1988 to provide the same kind of rigorous journalistic coverage of the nonprofit world as the company provided to colleges and universities. When the publication celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, Gwaltney donated an original front page, signed by editors and business leaders, to the philanthropy collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
Gwaltney believed nonprofits merited more attention from the news media and relished articles that had an impact on how journalists, policy makers, and others thought about the world of philanthropy. While he encouraged TheChronicle’s journalists to uncover abuses by donors, board members, or nonprofits, he also wanted the publication to help nonprofits, foundations, and others learn how to improve their efforts to change the world.
Gwaltney was just as eager to celebrate nonprofits that make a difference across the country and around the world, creating a section of the publication, called the Face of Philanthropy, that for more than 30 years has featured a striking double-page photo that captures a single nonprofit doing innovative work. He asked The Chronicle’s editor to always put that feature ahead of the news sections so that readers would be inspired by what makes philanthropy so essential before digging into reading about tough issues facing the nonprofit world.
Gwaltney is survived by his wife, Pamela, who is chair of The Chronicle; two daughters, Jean Gwaltney and Margaret Gwaltney; a son, Thomas Gwaltney; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.