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The Chronicle of Higher Education made four three major errors in a single sentence on Friday, mangling issues of technology, due process, and sexual ethics in an online story about a student at Calvin College.
Here’s the original lead to the article, posted on their blog…
A Calvin College student has been suspended for one year over a lewd Facebook message he allegedly sent to an ex-girlfriend.
And here’s what’s wrong with it…
1. The student, Tony Harris, wasn’t suspended, he was expelled. The university called it a suspension, but according to the Grand Rapids Press he will have to re-apply after the year is up. If you’re barred from campus and told you have to apply for re-admission, you haven’t been suspended. You’ve been kicked out.
1. The problem with the Facebook posting wasn’t that it was “lewd,” but that it was found to be harassing. The policy Harris was charged under prohibits “communication that degrades or harasses individuals or groups.” Harris was accused of harassing his ex by posting a derogatory sexual message about her, not of posting something lewd.
2. He wasn’t expelled because of the Facebook incident. He was given probation over it, and told to post an apology on his Facebook page. He was expelled for refusing to apologize, and he says he refused to apologize because he wasn’t the one who put up the post.
3. The post in question was a Facebook status update, not a message to the other student.
Why does any of this matter? Because these aren’t random errors. They’re symptomatic of larger weaknesses in writing about student disciplinary matters, sexual ethics, and new technology, failings that are commonplace not just at the Chronicle, but elsewhere as well.
If you’re going to write a story like this, the details matter. The details are all that matters.
There’s a huge difference between being suspended for sending someone a smutty email and being expelled for contesting a disciplinary finding that you harassed someone in a semi-public forum. If you neglect those distinctions, you’re not getting the story. The Chronicle didn’t get this story.
Update: As reader JRH notes, Harris’s status amounts to a suspension rather than an expulsion under the terms of the Calvin College student handbook. Studentactivism.net regrets the error.
The headlines of the two major articles on Tuesday’s public meeting at the New School each spin the story the same way…
The Chronicle of Higher Education: “New School Faculty Members Renew Standoff With President Bob Kerrey.”
The New York Times: “New School Faculty and President Still at Odds.”
But as followers of this blog know, and as each of the above articles make clear, the New School breakdown is as much a result of student-administration disputes as of faculty-admin conflicts. And the big news out of the meeting, a student group’s ultimatum to Kerrey: Quit by April 1, or we’ll shut the New School down, was downplayed in both pieces.
Take a look at how the Times framed the dispute. They say “faculty members acknowledge that they have limited power to force out Mr. Kerrey,” and note that Kerrey still has broad support among the New School trustees. But when they introduce the student ultimatum, in the fourteenth paragraph of an eighteen-paragraph story, they describe it as a request from “Geeti Das, a doctoral student,” not as what it was — a demand from The New School in Exile, the activist group that Das represented at the meeting.
Does the New School in Exile have the power to shut the university down? I don’t know. But I’m going to be watching this story closely, and I have a hunch that April 1 may turn out to be a pretty big day in the history of this crisis.
Juicy Campus, the internet gossip site, went dark this morning.
Founder Matt Ivester said yesterday that the site’s “growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn,” and that in recent weeks both ad revenue and venture capital had dried up. He posted a FAQ on the shutdown on the JC blog in which he left open the possibility of re-launching in the future.
We covered controversies surrounding the site here and here last semester. Inside Higher Ed has a good overview here.
Undergraduate applications to New Orleans colleges are spiking, driven by out-of-town students who want to lend a hand with post-Katrina recovery.
The increase is highest at Tulane University, with a record 40,000 applications for just 1,500 seats.
Many Tulane applicants say they have visited New Orleans as part of volunteer relief projects. “They get exposed to the city,” the college’s registrar said. “They get exposed to the university.”
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