Late Nights, Long Mornings

Columbia's administration works on a different clock than Columbia's students.

I don't mean that statement as a dig in any way, but rather, simply as a statement of fact. They've all done the college thing and by now, all of the spokesmen and deans and EVPs have jobs that stop at the end of the day and families that don't. (The number of high-profile people at this school who have young children and still manage to put in 8, 10, 12 hour days always amazes me. You think we as students have it bad? Try earning enough money to pay NYC rents and making time to spend with your two year-old twins on top of whatever you do for school in a job where you often have to deal with crises that affect a University population of 65,000 people--more.)

And so it makes sense that when Spec is doing its reporting, many of our faculty and administrative sources have better things to do than to talk to us. At least one administrator puts his children to bed every night while another will set up a meeting with you basically anytime you like so long as he gets to have dinner with his children. Further, while students often give us information at 11, midnight, or one in the morning that makes it into the next days paper, administrative sources are asleep.

So what happens when, as has happened in both of the last two days, we receive breaking news about a big story that would seem to necessitate an administrative response. On Monday, we reported that students had been disciplined in the University's highest-profile news cycle all year, while last night we carried a quote by Karina Garcia, one of the censured students, which read: "They bowed to right-wing pressure. It's noteworthy that Columbia reserved the harshest punishment for Latinos-two Mexican-Americans and one Dominican."

So how does the Spec balance the need to report the news with the need to be responsible? It's handled on a case-by-case basis. On Monday, since we had our news relatively early in the day--around six p.m.--it involved a number of communications between Tom Faure, who reported the story, myself, and University officials.

Last night, though, we got our news--and Garcia's quote--at midnight, well after what we know to be the bedtimes of officials in the Office of Public Affairs. We put in a hopeless call, but had to decide whether or not to run the quote. If we run it and provide the University only a longshot opportunity to comment, it makes us seem uncritical in our reporting. If we don't run the quote, we risk marginalizing people who support Garcia's contention Spec.

The decision was made during a half hour meeting between myself, the managing editor, and the editor in chief. After reading through the piece again at two in the morning, we decided to run the quote (as Bwog readers have clearly noted). We believe that it's the right decision, though we can certainly see and understand how an opposite argument could be made, and I have been sitting in classes this morning with my stomach churning going back and forth about the pros and cons.

In any case, I guess my point is that we don't make these decisions lightly.