Is The Atlantic Right to Report on a Report the Way it Did?

I previously commented on an article about a paper by the president of Northwestern,

Northwestern President Publishes Study About Northwestern And the National Bureau of Economic Research Publishes It?

The paper apparently is getting lots of publicity and The Atlantic published a second post on it, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/are-tenured-professors-really-worse-teachers-a-lit-review/279940/#comments

I don’t agree with some of the reporter’s views and here is what I wrote,

“As a non-tenured professor who taught for many years at a similar university, Washington University in St. Louis, I think two points are important. First, non-tenured faculty have much more to lose if they don’t yield to pressures from administrators to achieve “content deflation”. (They don’t call it this.) In STEM courses, in particular, “content deflation” keeps students in the major (read revenue for the Engineering School, plaudits from US NEWS) by leading them to believe that it is easier than it really is and/or they are better at it than is really the case. If you want to see how determined administrators can be to dumb down courses, even for students who don’t even seem to want to read homework, see my new article, A Tale Out of School – A Case Study in Higher Education, on my blog, inside-higher-ed.com

Here is the second point. Doesn’t one of the authors of the study (the President of Northwestern) have a horse in this race? If a car company reported a study that indicated what they may want it to indicate, would we take that at face value and write, “…the study showed…”?