After perpetuating ambiguity, News must find truth
So: Aliza Shvarts ’08 doesn’t get to hang her senior project; Art Department lecturer Pia Lindman has been suspended and another Yale official disciplined; Chase Olivarius-McAllister ’09 wants Yale College Dean Salovey out; and Salovey himself has gone white as a sheet — he is appalled. Meantime, prefrosh tread nervously the campus greens these Bulldog Days, knowing that they, the fetuses of Yale, are at special risk.
I don’t know much about the News and its inner workings, but if college has taught me one thing, it’s the importance of novelty in interpretation, the necessity of...
excellent guest column. my initial reaction to this last week was that the YDN deserves most of the blame and/or credit for the whole thing.
rock on, big daddy murph!
THANK YOU. I don't think the News should be motivated by concern for "Yale and its reputation," but this was terrible journalism. And the columns -- Shvarts' own and the one by Chase O-M -- made it obvious that the News was just fanning the flames to milk the story in lieu of new information.
I’m glad someone is bringing this point up - if she is lying to deans, faculty, peers....will Yale really give her a diploma? I did a quick search of the Yale website, is there no honor or discipline code? I’d be interested to see if this student is in violation…of something.
Yeah, that's right, take no personal responsibility. Well done.
my sentiments exactly, except i would go one step further.
i don't think they were trying to milk it, i think they are just incompetent journalists. regular students pretentiously trying (but failing) to live in the shadow of luce and buckley and all the famous EICs of yesteryear, if you will.
their breaking of this story was atrocious. as you rightly point out, the sourcing was limited to shvart's friend and the student groups on both sides of the abortion debate.
was this because they wanted to spark debate?
i don't even give them that much credit. i think the reporter got the sources she had easiest access to (ie. undergrads), and the editors rushed the story out without pausing to think about its implications.
the average yalie would have realized how huge the story was, and would naturally have wanted to know what actually happened, as opposed to what shvarts said her project was about. apparently, the folks at 202 york aren't thinking like the average yalie at 4.30 in the morning when they are editing the paper. apparently, they didn't stop to think that it would be wise to hold off the story until they got better sourcing.
go on and found the next time magazine? guys, the odds of you doing that are the same as mine. zero to none.
An even more important point about this story is not the factual "can she inseminate herself" question but whether or not she was delusional enough to try.
For many people the issue is whether or not the student is cognizant of what she's doing. Self-mutilation is not out of the question regardless of the rhetoric and breeding factoids.
If Yale has an imbalanced individual on their hands then someone should start paying attention.
#6, I too blame Eamon Murphy for this fiasco.
they did get to the bottom of it, albeit a week late.
http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24630
How about taking a piece of the project over to the Yale labs and seeing if its real blood? Seems easy enough and would give us all an answer.