Big Education's Accountability Starts With Courageous Student Journalists

The picture of journalism in America currently looks bleak.

Trust in the media is at a new low, with only 28 percent of Americans expressing "a great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in our newspapers, TV, and radio for their news, an October 2025 Gallup poll shows. This jaundiced view reflects the growing number of Americans who are concerned that journalists are beholden to elite interests and woke ideology. It also reflects the notion that journalists have abandoned serious reporting for political pandering for clicks.

Allow these brave Harvard University student journalists to resettle your imaginations. Dhruv Patel and Cam Srivastava, both student reporters for the Harvard Crimson, recently broke the story that former President Larry Summers pursued a clandestine relationship with former Harvard student Keyu Jin '04, and talked extensively with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein about it.

The information was buried in the release of more than 10,000 pages of files related to Epstein's communications. It took hours of scavenging to find, and additional digging to confirm the former student's name, which was not in the initial correspondence with Epstein.

Patel and Srivastava also dug up numerous contextual relays of Summers' and Epstein's many exchanges, including a belief that Epstein was a guru with "Chinese women" and a comparison of Summers' chances with Jin to the outlook on a potential Trump presidency.

These golden finds exemplify why student journalism is essential—it often exposes stories that universities would rather stay hidden. Harvard swiftly responded to the story by announcing that Summers would immediately leave his teaching post and that it would not renew his contract. Social media posts surrounding the change included a video of one Harvard professor trying desperately to rehabilitate Summers' stained reputation, saying he would miss Summers' "insights and wisdom." His speech was interrupted by a female student who loudly proclaimed, "No, we won't!"

Larry Summers leaves Harvard due to student pressure.

Wait for it... "NO WE WON'T!"
🔥🔥 Gen Z is based. pic.twitter.com/NmTrQKWEd6

— Louisa Clary (@LouisaClary) November 21, 2025

When real journalism is broadcast onto the mainstream, it provides real impact. Good on Dhruv and Srivastava for breaking the story.

As these student journalists show, universities are incapable of self-policing their own institutions because they operate under a host of malign incentives and self-protective impulses. In the era of declining alumni enthusiasm for education, universities seem to think that if they close their eyes and wish it all away, their problems will magically disappear.

If anything, these courageous student journalists are exposing the naked realities that universities conceal because they are unflattering to their constituents. They are helping students, parents, and lawmakers become more aware of reality.

For example, in one of my previous articles for Restoration News, I interviewed Alex Shieh, who emailed hundreds of Brown University administrators with the subject line: "What do you do?" His email prompted the Brown director to email officials, writing, "Do not respond." This is how universities greet skeptical inquiry—by shutting down and hoping it all goes away.

But dogged journalists prevent apathy from taking over. Unhindered, Shieh found that most of Brown's jobs were diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles; redundant; or "bullshit jobs" such as "associate vice provost of campus engagement." Since his journalistic tactics went viral, he has inspired other efficiency hawks to bring the same cost-cutting mindset to their organizations. For example, Bari Weiss, the recently appointed head of CBS News, emailed company staff asking them to explain what they did at the company.

Student journalists are not just valuable, they are potentially inspirational. After all, as a young person who fought his way through the college admissions process, I wrote a book that laid out a failsafe case for how Harvard discriminated against Asian Americans in admissions through its "personality" score. I was right, and my book was vindicated at the Supreme Court—while kickstarting an anti-DEI movement that has pushed out the corrosive ideology across many campuses.

So, what happens when journalists get out into the real world, outside of school? Do their investigative skills and hunter's instincts disappear?

Not necessarily. Rather, I believe the activist-educational complex descends on them and influences their judgment with the dollar bill and the grade marker.

Journalists get sucked into ideology when their schools hire deans with an ideological bent, like University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism Dean Raul Reis, who sought to push a DEI agenda down students' throats. These are activists disguised as journalists for prestigious positions, and they wield influence over brave young minds. In 2021, UNC infamously attempted to hire Nikole Hannah-Jones, the author of the critical race theory dogma "The 1619 Project," practically begging her to become a professor, only for her to snub the school to teach at Howard.

Hannah-Jones was an opinion columnist, not a historian, and she was not the best representative of journalistic ethics or objectivity. Yet students would have been made to indulge and listen to her prattle about America's "original sin of racism" and other unevidenced "facts." These students implicitly learn that, as journalists, it is better to be in with the right networks than to scrounge for the truth.

Big Education beats the intellectual fire out of our young journalists. Then it offers carrots to those who join "nonprofit news" sites with an explicitly ideological bent that propagate political narratives rather than investigate bad actors.

That leaves student journalists with golden handcuffs and bitter truths left untold. As a country, we can and should do better to support student journalists who publish hard-hitting work because they are making people aware of the real world around them, not the world that malign institutional actors want us to see.

(READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s Tax Credit is Fueling Christians’ Public School Exodus)