Letter from the Editor

On our website and through email and even in personal discussions, we at The Swinging Bridge have received many thoughtful responses to the article "Student Claims Racial Profiling by Public Safety Officer." Our hope with the article was to both to inform students about what happened and to encourage dialogue throughout campus, and we are happy that both seem to be results of its publication.As one of the writers of the article, I, along with the other staff members of The Swinging Bridge, realize that the concerns some expressed about the nature of the article are probably shared by other students who were unaware of the nine week process that went into writing the article.

Sari Heidenreich (my co-author) and I made numerous efforts to obtain permission to speak with college officials and public safety officers and the newspaper was not given permission to interview Officer Lippert. At first, we were told this was because the investigations were ongoing. Ultimately, the investigations were concluded at the last minute before our deadlines, so we could not use interview information even if we had been cleared to conduct an interview. In addition, the college, like many organizations, has many safeguards on the privacy of employees and on the confidentiality of deliberations about an employee. In this situation, to your chagrin, this got in the way of the kinds of information readers like you wanted.

It may be helpful to realize that many safeguards on student privacy and confidentiality are also in place; the student who was the subject of our article had chosen to waive that right to privacy and to tell us his story. When others figuring in these events chose not to speak to the paper, it certainly could look like we were intentionally presenting only one side of the story.

We assure you that we here at The Swinging Bridge take our mission very seriously. Two of the goals in our constitution, in fact, are "to decrease the impact of rumors on our campus by providing it with relevant and factual stories pertaining to topics of importance," and "to promote and ensure freedom of the press at Messiah College and among its students."

We know that pursuing these worthy goals may look a bit messy at times, but we believe the messiness of following stories and reporting them diligently is worth the effort and the mess.