Valor and Discretion

Last Thursday, The Crimson’s front page reported that Steven R. Duque ’08-’09, implicated in the well-publicized Quincy House drug arrest, will not face prison time. To The Crimson’s credit, the paper featured the exoneration as prominently as it did the charges. Yet the residues remain. Were one to google “Steven Duque,” one would discover the bad publicity on the first page of the search results; the exoneration is a little more difficult to find.

For all practical purposes then, Duque’s reputation is tainted.

College papers—such as The Crimson, the Harvard Salient, or the Independent—have a difficult task in deciding what counts as news. On the one hand is the journalistic pursuit of truth; on the other is the paper’s chronicling role within the community. In Duque’s case, it seems newspapers may have done more harm than good.

Officially, The Crimson, like many other papers, has a default policy of printing publicly available information. This is a dangerous default position, as Duque’s case shows. Instead, college newspapers must consider the merits of printing students’ names on a case-by-case basis.

Often, the argument for publishing names is that they will exist as a public record anyhow. This argument may have been true as late as 20 years ago, but today we live in a Google world. A campus newspaper and its digital archives are far more accessible than any public record. In fact, to access any public record, one would need to exert a considerable degree of effort—the easiest course of action might be to hire a background-checking service to examine a specific individual at one’s own cost, approximately $50-60 per name. Moreover, a public record of an arrest can be purged, whereas online archives afford a permanence that is difficult to ignore.

The publication of a piece like the one detailing the Quincy incident is also different from a public record in that it broadcasts information and not merely retains it for future reference. Students are far more likely to read about a classmate’s youthful indiscretions in a school paper than similar actions by others in a professional paper. Overall, the decision to print carries more weight now than it ever did in the past.

Such is not only true in the case of campus arrests but also in more trivial matters, such as last spring’s altercation involving a shuttle-bus driver and senior football players, Dan P. Lane ’07 as well as James R. Velissaris ’07, which continues to reverberate in posterity.

Last week, a piece in The Boston Globe on the dismissal of a football player from the team mentioned Lane and Velissaris in an aside. This fallout exemplifies the difficulty often faced by students simply trying to move forward after regrettable incidents.

Of course, a newspaper has a right to publish names, and such a policy may even be valuable in cases involving publicly known figures—such as the well-publicized plagiarism case of Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 last spring. But an entirely different standard must be applied to private figures who are involuntarily thrust into the spotlight.

Instead of relying on a default “print” option, newspapers need to think. The community’s benefit from reporting a student’s name, or exercising free speech for its own sake, does not always supersede the harm it does to the individual. Too much truth can be a decidedly bad thing, and blindly printing students’ names is a naïve way of avoiding a complex moral decision.



Joseph T. M. Cianflone ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is an economics and math concentrator in Leverett House.