The Citizen posts an occasional feature under the heading “Where are They Now? “in which we spotlight Bedford High graduates who have gone on to distinguished careers in a variety of fields. Today we’re focusing on Beth McMurtrie, Class of 1982, who this month is marking 25 years as a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
When Beth McMurtrie decided to major in economics at Wellesley College, she was being realistic: “I figured economics would help me get a job,” she told a Citizen reporter. And she did land jobs in that field, but within a few years discovered what she really liked was writing. She began freelancing and then, “at the old age of 29,” she joked, “I got a master’s degree from the Columbia School of Journalism in 1994.”
That led to an internship at Newsday, a Long Island publication, and later to a variety of newspaper jobs in the south, everything from covering the police beat for the Tampa Bay Tribune (where she met her husband, John Lawson, also a reporter) to higher education reporter for the Greensboro, NC News & Record.
McMurtrie turned that experience into her current quarter-century stint as senior writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, headquartered in Washington, D.C.
As McMurtrie relates in her Linkedin profile about joining the Chronicle, “It was my first experience writing for a national news organization, and I was thrilled to be in a newsroom so committed to producing excellent journalism. My first major story was about the controversial president of Baylor University. Coming from a local newsroom, I remember how excited I was that my editors wanted me to fly from Washington, D.C., to Waco, Texas to report in person.”
Since that time, she has written countless articles about campus diversity, freedom of expression on campus, culture wars at Catholic colleges, higher education in other countries, and more recently, about teaching and the intersection of teaching and technology.
When ChatGPT burst upon the world two years ago, McMurtrie’s editor asked her to look into it. Since then she has covered AI (artificial intelligence) as it has been adopted, endorsed, or alternately, reviled, on college and university campuses.
Her most recent article, in the June 13 issue of the Chronicle, is titled: “Professors Ask: Are We Just Grading Robots?” The tagline is “Some are Riding the AI Wave: Others Feel Like they are Drowning.”
For this long form piece, McMurtrie interviewed professors from a range of universities, from Waterloo in Canada to the University of Mississippi to an English professor at a Texas community college – all are grappling with AI in their daily classroom experience.
The Canadian professor of religious studies told her he has seen a “massive” uptick in the use of AI, estimating that about 25 percent of his students used generative AI in their assignments. A lecturer in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi said that he and his colleagues were experimenting with ChatGPT in the early days and he has seen how companies are marketing the various tools to students, often through influencers on TikTok.
For this most recent article, McMurtrie conducted her interviews by phone. For a story focusing on a single campus, she will travel to that location for in-depth talks with faculty. Her work environment today is hybrid, only requiring two or three “in office” days for editorial conferences.
Since 2002 McMurtrie has lived in Arlington, VA with her husband and two children – Anthony, a recent graduate of James Madison University, and Charlotte, who is going in to her second year at the University of Virginia.
McMurtrie shared that generally she comes up with her own ideas for stories and she is indeed a prolific writer. In addition to her reported stories in the Chronicle, she and another reporter take turns writing and editing “Teaching,” a weekly newsletter with a focus on the intersection of learning and technology. Some recent articles touched on areas of interest to almost any reader:
- “Can Guided Reading Teach Students to Become Better Readers?” (June 6)
- “How to Teach About Contentious Topics Like Israel and Hamas” (May 9) – One professor shares his approach to debating fraught issues.
About that police reporter she met in Tampa and later married? John Lawson III was prescient enough to realize back in the late 1990s that the newspaper business was heading rapidly downhill. He left the reporting job, earned an engineering degree and is now a military analyst at Quantico, VA. And he is also a writer. Lawson’s latest book, “Kurtz,” the story of a female Marine, was published in March. And, McMurtrie said, “one of the two main characters is from Bedford.”
The McMurtrie-Lawson family makes a yearly visit to Bedford in the summer that includes a trip to Cape Cod. McMurtrie’s sister and brother still live in the family home on Hayden Lane.
About the Chronicle of Higher Education: A paid subscription is required to read the full issue online, but you may sign up for a daily newsletter that lists the articles and the first couple of paragraphs of each. The publication will allow you to read two full articles per month. There is a print edition that comes out less frequently.
[Editor’s Note: Biographical corrections were made to this story on June 22, 2024.]
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