THE CAVALIER Daily has helped make the debate over the Honor Committee's single sanction policy a major part of the University community's agenda this year.
Throughout the fall semester, Cavalier Daily reporters have covered meetings about the topic, the managing board has repeatedly written editorials about the subject and columnists have chimed in with their own opinions. But the newspaper's focus on the subject intensified last week with articles and guest columns aimed at showing the complexities of the debate.
Associate editor Lauren Todd Pappa, who covers Honor and UJC, made the largest contribution to the paper's continuing coverage of the issue with an article in the Wednesday Focus section ("Single Sanction: Scapegoat or Suspect?"). Pappa summarized what the Honor Committee has done to address the issue in the last few months and the reaction of student groups on both sides of the debate. Her article laid out the cases of one group that wants to change the current system and another that wants to keep it intact.
On Monday, Pappa and associate editor Sarah Gatsos collaborated on an article about the faculty's views on the honor system. Pappa and Gatsos noted that the faculty cannot change the system because students run it, but the article provided an important perspective since faculty members initiate a majority of honor cases.
Last week's Opinion page also featured guest columns from three people close to the debate: Honor Committee Chair Meghan Sullivan, Students for the Preservation of Honor Chair Josh Hess and Sanction Reform Committee Chair Sara Page. Those columns started a series in which The Cavalier Daily will give professors and students with a variety of perspectives on the subject a chance to share their views.
The Cavalier Daily's editors clearly want the single sanction debate to be a major topic of discussion at the University. In the editorial that introduced the series, the managing board reminded everyone that it has made its feelings about the topic clear. The board, however, said it wants the series of guest columns to give readers "the information they need to form an intelligent opinion on the sanction" rather than promote one particular view. By giving people on every side of the argument a forum for their views, the editors are ensuring the debate will be productive regardless of the way it is resolved.
Poll questions
Newspapers can write all they want about their perceptions of public sentiment on contentious issues like the single sanction debate, but they ultimately need empirical evidence to adequately discuss the general public's mood. Few things provide better evidence than a poll or survey.
Wednesday's Focus story included a non-scientific survey about the University's honor system conducted by a staff reporter. The Cavalier Daily published the survey results with the exact wording of the three questions the reporter asked and the absolute numbers of respondents' answers.
Focus Editor Jason Amirhadji also explained in detail the methodology of the poll, which any media organization should do when presenting that kind of information. Amirhadji wrote that the reporter collected 209 valid responses to the survey while standing outside the Pavilion XI dining facility for four hours on Monday afternoon. He noted that The Cavalier Daily did not compensate for potential biases in the survey results but said that he did not accept responses from professors and students connected to the Honor Committee.
The paper presented its survey results in a way that allowed readers to understand exactly what it did. The presentation of the data could not have been much better. But the methodology contained one major flaw, even for a non-scientific survey.
Amirhadji pointed out that many respondents wanted to give more nuanced responses to the questions, but the only acceptable answer for the survey was a simple "yes" or "no." People's views on controversial issues like the single sanction rarely break down into such clear-cut categories.
The Cavalier Daily's survey could have reflected the complexity of the single sanction issue if respondents had more options. The paper, for example, could have given respondents a choice of answers similar to the 2002 Student Survey on Honor, the results of which were also published Wednesday.
Despite the limited number of available responses, the survey allowed The Cavalier Daily's readers to better gauge student sentiment about the single sanction. With some improvement in the way it asks poll questions, the paper could effectively use this reporting tool for future articles on other important issues.
Jeremy Ashton can be reached at ombud@cavalierdaily.com.
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