Good colleges need good watchdogs
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Genevieve Morrison is the editor in chief of The Heights, the independent student newspaper at Boston College. Student journalists at Cornell were the first to report that a former student had filed a civil lawsuit alleging she was raped at a frat party in 2024. Since they did that, professional outlets have taken the story further. The New York Times exclusively obtained documents from the university’s investigation of the incident. CBS broke the news of the Snapchat messages sent on the night of the alleged rape. Traditional outlets do a great job exposing wrongdoing at colleges when they have a reason to look. But someone has to sound the alarm before anyone else knows there’s a fire. A student newspaper is often the sole news organization with reporters on the ground, paying attention, and invested in what happens on a campus. We do important work. But we need the buy-in of other students, readers, and — most of all — administrators to do our jobs well. Private colleges are unusually difficult to report on from the outside. Private schools generally aren’t subject to public records law. As a college journalist myself, I know what that means in practice.
This article is an excerpt. To read the full content, visit the original source. The Boston Globe
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