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Remembering our friend and colleague Fazil Khan 

Khan, who moved to the U.S. from India to attend Columbia Journalism School, was a beloved colleague and star data journalist dedicated to exposing injustice  

By Hechinger Staff  

Fazil Khan got in just under the wire when he applied for a data reporter job at The Hechinger Report in the summer of 2022. 

While his application may have been among the last received, his interview vaulted him to the front of the pack. 

“I don’t know that anyone has ever made that positive a first impression on me anywhere, let alone via a tiny Zoom screen,” said Sarah Butrymowicz, Hechinger’s senior editor for investigations and Khan’s direct supervisor. “You could just tell right away that he was such a thoughtful person, really smart.” 

And that impression proved true. No more than two weeks after he was hired, he burrowed into a project uncovering Arizona’s habit of handing out long suspensions for attendance violations, often derailing students’ academic progress. 

“We said, ‘Here’s this disaster of a spreadsheet, have fun!’” Butrymowicz said. “But he had no complaints, no grumbling, he was able to wrangle it.” The project led to proposed legislation in Arizona.  

Khan, 27, died February 23 in a fire in his Harlem apartment building. Though his time at Hechinger was short, he made a dazzling imprint on those fortunate enough to call him a colleague. 

“Fazil always thought about ways reporting problems could be solved, rather than why they were intractable,” said Jon Marcus, a higher education writer at Hechinger. 

Among the collaborations between Marcus and Khan was reporting that found that many colleges were raising their net prices — the cost after discounts and financial aid — faster for their poorest students than for their richest. Khan then produced a follow-up story about colleges where the richest students pay less than their lower-income classmates. 

Khan “was thoughtful about using data not just as an end unto itself but to tell important stories about students who get shut out of the privileges that come with higher educations,” Marcus said. 

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