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Jill Abramson will be a visiting lecturer at Harvard.
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Only a month after being dismissed from her position as the executive editor of the New York Times, the Ivy League University Harvard has announced that Jill Abramson will be a guest lecturer in English there starting this fall.
A member of Harvard’s class of 1976 with a BA in History and Literature, Abramson is slated to now teach her alma mater’s pupils one class per semester on narrative non-fiction journalism. The classes will be limited to twelve participants and will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
In a press release Abramson said, “I’m honored and excited to be teaching at Harvard in the coming academic year. Narrative non-fiction journalism is more important than ever. Its traditions and how it is changing in the digital transition are fascinating areas of study.”
Harvard faculty members are also happy to have her there. It’s Dean of arts and humanities Professor Diana Sorensen said in a statement, “Harvard is delighted to welcome Jill Abramson to the English Department, where her students in the Writing Program will profit enormously from her insights, experience and brilliance.”
Even her replacement at the Times Dan Baquet said in an e mail to the Harvard Crimson, “I think Harvard is lucky to have Jill. She is a brilliant journalist, a fine writer and reporter. I’d take her class in a heartbeat.”
Abramson served as the first woman executive editor of The New York Times from September 2011 to May 2014. In a shocking move, she was abruptly fired on May 14th by New York Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., who replaced her with the paper’s managing editor Dean Baquet.
Rumors and accusations abounded that her dismissal resulted from sex discrimination. In response, Sulzberger released a statement saying, “Jill is an outstanding journalist and editor, but with great regret, I concluded that her management of the newsroom was simply not working out.” Sulzberger said that he had received far too many complaints about Abramson from staffers and had warned her that she could be fired if she did not change her management style.
But Ken Auletta of The New Yorker Magazine had a different view. He wrote that, several weeks before her termination, Abramson had discovered that she was paid less in both pension and salary as both executive editor and as managing editor than her male predecessor Bill Keller.
Auletta cited an anonymous source who told him that Abramson was branded after she confronted the paper’s owners about it. The Times claimed that her pay was raised after she complained.
Abramson began her career in journalism as the Arts Editor of The Harvard Independent when she was in college. Her first role for a major publication came in 1988 when she became a senior reporter in the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Bureau. Abramson worked for The Journal until 1997, becoming it’s deputy bureau chief.
That year Abramson She moved to The New York Times in and was promoted to its Washington bureau chief in December 2000.
