Our little North Carolina scandal has caused the resignation of North Carolina State’s chancellor, provost, and chairman of the board of trustees, and the termination of the employee whose hiring started it all, Mary Easley, the wife of the former North Carolina governor. With the bodies strewn on the battlefield, the story finally caught the eye of the national press.

Inside Higher Education lumped together three “case studies in college crisis” — ours, the one over politicized admissions at the University of Illinois, and one I hadn’t heard of, a brouhaha over the bad manners of the wife of the president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.

This story, “Survival Tactics,” is about negotiating through “troubled waters,” and it consists of crisis-management advice from the likes of Gordon Gee and other seasoned administrators. It is a “how to” story.

IHE chose not to write about the ethical issues that underlie this scandal. Yet there are plenty: the university’s automatic obeisance to the state’s governor, the attempts to cover up that slavishness, and the lavish financial arrangements given to administrators who resigned under pressure. Only near the end of the article is there a suggestion that sometimes presidents under fire can’t survive and still “keep their integrity intact.” The attitude of entitlement that pervades higher education seems to have infected even this promising member of the watchdog press.

The assumption that the university is above the rest of us came clear as the N.C. State scandal unfolded. My favorite example is from the chancellor’s resignation announcement: “I am [resigning] because that is what leaders do when the institutions they lead come under distracting and undue public scrutiny.”

Undue public scrutiny of a system that state taxpayers support with $2.7 billion a year? What, I wonder, would he consider appropriate scrutiny? Perhaps he would agree with the new chairman of the board, who said to the media that the whole thing was just “nitpicking.”