Headshot of Kathryn Joyce. Photo courtesy of Kathryn Joyce.
The investigative editor at In These Times, Kathryn Joyce is a seasoned vet in the field of journalism with a career of over 20 years. In 2009, she published Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, which focused on the eponymous religious movement and how the philosophy shaped believers’ domestic lives. Four years later, she wrote The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption, which exposed the industry of child adoption and how it had become entangled with the “conservative Christian agenda.” Over the past two years she has paid particularly close attention to the politics of New College. In February 2023, barely a month after the “hostile takeover” began, Joyce published a long-form essay in Vanity Fair that revealed the roots and grasped the importance of New College’s conservative transformation. She covered the distress that came with all of the forced changes, but she also presciently warned readers that American conservative figures were pushing for similar higher education reform across all of the nation’s campuses.
In December 2024, Joyce published the sequel, “The New College Gambit,” an over 7,000-word investigation based on her on-the-ground reporting of the rocky implementation of New College’s right-wing overhaul, and warning that, under the new Trump administration, “the attacks on universities are about to get worse.”
In a virtual interview with this Old School Catalyst reporter, Joyce reflected on seeing the signs of rising attacks on higher education coming years before they became common front page headlines.
“I stumbled into reporting about right-wing education politics a little bit earlier [than 2023], by happenstance,” Joyce said. “Back in 2018, I did a long-form story about how the aftermath of the Parkland shooting tragedy in Broward County gave rise to this right-wing counter narrative that, to put it in the words of one of my sources, ‘It wasn’t the guns, it was Obama’[…] There emerged this narrative driven overwhelmingly by a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a guy named Max Eden. It became this incredibly vicious local fight that seemed to touch on so many different things.
“While that was something more specific, and it was K-12 politics instead [of higher education], that was some early exposure to me on how a lot of these education politics played out, specifically when it came to the right,” Joyce continued. “That led me directly to looking at attacks on public education in Florida.”
Joyce’s alma mater, Hampshire College, is a liberal arts college that has drawn comparisons to New College for its similarities in curriculum and ethos. Hampshire even offered tuition matching in Spring 2024 for New College students looking to transfer in the aftermath of the institution’s political changes.
“I have to admit, I had not heard of New College prior to January 6, 2023, though I’m sad that I didn’t,” Joyce said. “One of the things that really was amazing to me when I learned about New College was that they were doing what Hampshire did, except [it was] actually affordable. As someone who went to Hampshire on Pell Grants and loads of student debt, I thought that was remarkable because I really appreciated the education I got at Hampshire.
“New College really stood out to me in that way,” Joyce continued. “It really struck me that [the] takeover would be intensely painful, probably at almost any college, but really imagining it happening to a school like the one that I had gone to made it stand out for me what a radical and hostile transformation they were affecting there.”
Reporting on a situation like the New College transformation can be a challenging task in America’s polarized culture, especially for student journalists. When asked how she reconciles her personal and professional value commitments, Joyce said, “I am making a value judgment and I have a strong perspective,” Joyce said. “I write from a progressive perspective. There are long and deep debates about the concept of objectivity in journalism… but I tend to think that a lot of objectivity is not its [journalism’s] best form, which is striving for fairness, but not letting it blind you to when there are clear facts.
“Too often it can end up becoming something that’s a lot more like stenography. . . . Reporting that is too timid to make a call when one side has better claim to the truth,” Joyce elaborated. “There has been a timidity in some of the mainstream media to cover some things that are going on politically and socially in a rigorous and honest way out of concern for being called biased. I think the lesson that we should’ve learned by now is that the media is going to be called biased regardless, because that is a very valuable political tool.”
Joyce spoke about taking a stance in reporting while still maintaining journalistic integrity.
“[It’s] about being transparent with the reader,” Joyce said. “If you’re standing on the left with In These Times or standing on the right, with The National Review. . . . Standing in the center is still a position. I think it’s just [about] being transparent [saying], ‘These are the sorts of values that inform the way I’m interpreting this,’ or ‘These are the sorts of values that informed why I chose to quote this person, or this part of our three-hour conversation.’”
Joyce considered how the role of a student journalist has changed given the turbulent political climate not just at New College, but on a national scale as well.
“It’s such a challenging time for any kind of truth-telling or dissent, but it’s deeply important,” Joyce said. “Part of the reason that we’re at this whole juncture, I feel really strongly, is that we have been operating as a country in a context where there are huge amounts of misleading or outright false propaganda that people are consuming instead of news. . . . We’ve got a huge, angry polarization in this country and I think outright propaganda is a huge part of that, I think timid mainstream media is part of what enabled that. Lazy ideas of objectivity have been an enabling factor.
“Being able to have a record that these things are happening is really important,” Joyce continued. “Twenty things happen each day that all have huge national importance. It’s really hard, even for those of us whose job it is to be paying attention to everything that’s happening, to keep up. As overwhelming as that is, the only answer is to keep doing the work.”
Given the attacks on First Amendment rights affecting students across the country, like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, Joyce advised that student reporters “be aware of the context they are working in,” finding the balance between taking action and taking caution.
“We all have to think about our own situations and what level of risk we can take,” Joyce said. “Some people might have different answers for what sort of risk they can take on. It sounds dramatic saying this from my apartment right now, but if I go and look at the news right now, it’s not dramatic to say that we’re living in a really dangerous time where things are happening that are not in accordance with the law or our constitutionally protected freedoms. And it is still really important to let people know what’s going on. And you know, to do the bearing witness that is kind of the foundational part of journalism.”
