Did you hear the one about the Ivy League university crossing the road?

Like the rest of us who teach at campuses that are neither R1s nor elite SLACs nor draped elegantly in ivy, Corey Robin cannot help noticing a certain narrowness in mass media coverage of higher ed.  Well, yes.  Besides the reasons other commenters have pointed out--Harvard and Yale grads covering Harvard and Yale, etc.--I think that there's also some convenient homogeneity at the upper end of the scale.   Such campuses are generally competing nation-wide for the same kind of student; expecting similar research outcomes from their faculty; and, for that matter, hiring faculty from within their own particular network.  Smaller and/or less elite campuses, whether comprehensive colleges or directional states, of necessity tend to think locally (although financial pressures are changing that), may have different hiring priorities, have wildly varying expectations about research, and so forth.   (This is why I have come to look askance at the deluges of academic hiring advice that professional career counselors pour forth each season: much of it has to be ignored for any given college.)  Incorporating colleges like mine requires reporters to think about not only different campus cultures, but also regional issues (my little SUNY fits rather differently into its part of NY than Robin's CUNY), varying responses to financial questions, demographic vagaries, and the like.