READER'S ASK: WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Why We Disclose the Identities of Students Charged With Drug Crimes

This is the second in a series of bi-weekly columns designed to
explain The Crimson's policy decisions and coverage choices.

While stories of faculty politics and administrative infighting have
dominated The Crimson's front pages, few articles published in the
last two months have been as newsworthyaE"or as controversialaE"as
our account of a drug arrest in Quincy House on Feb. 24.

Campus police searched a Quincy House dorm and arrested a 20-year-old
sophomore for marijuana and LSD possession. The department released
the sophomore's name in an e-mail to a reporter, and that name
appeared on the cover of The CrimsonaE"along with a police officer's
account of the incident and interviews with some of the arrested
student's acquaintances.

Not everyone was pleased with the comprehensiveness of our coverage.
Some readers complained about The Crimson's policy of printing the
names of students charged with drug crimes. While we take these
complaints seriously, we ultimately believe that The Crimson has an
obligation to provide our readers with thorough reports of campus
drug arrests. That requires us to name names.

We recognize that our policy may carry serious ramifications for
Harvard students who are arrested on drug charges. As one reader told
us in an e-mail: "the stories that you have published are online and
free information for anyone competent to run google searches. This
means that for your 2 minutes of glory as journalists and editors,
students at Harvard have a hugely compromised professional life." The
reader added that "absolutely no good can come from publishing the
students' names."

Presumably a potential employer would run a basic background search
that would turn up Middlesex District Court records from the Quincy
House student's case. The student's name is also onlineaE"and
available for freeaE"in the logs posted on the Harvard University
Police Department (HUPD) website. So even if the Feb. 24 arrest does
"hugely compromise" the student's future, we're not sure whether that
comes as a result of The Crimson's decision. But we believe that good
can come from publishing students' names in drug cases.

Some of the most vociferous objections to The Crimson's policy of
naming names have come from members of our own staff. After a January
article identified four undergraduates facing marijuana charges, one
editor wrote in an e-mail: "I think this example raises a fundamental
point of how we should see ourselves within the Harvard Community. We
are not the New York Times. We are a school newspaperaE&I worry
desperately if we prize abstract ideals over the realities of our community."

But in our community, the reality is that The Crimson's position
vis-A -vis the University Police is similar to the New York Times'
stance vis-A -vis local and state law enforcement agencies. Some
members of the HUPD force are special officers of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. Some members of the force are deputy sheriffs of
Middlesex and Suffolk counties. The Crimson took Harvard to court in
our effort to gain access to HUPD records because we believe that
members of this community should monitor the campus police force
vigilantlyaE"just as off-campus law enforcement agencies face strict
public scrutiny from non-student, for-profit publications.

This is especially important for drug cases. The number of people
arrested on drug charges at Harvard is no doubt just a tiny fraction
of the total number of Harvard community members who have used
illegal substances. So how do University Police decide whom they
should arrest? While we have no evidence that recent campus drug
arrests follow any sort of pattern, you don't have to take my word
for it: our reports allow you to track the University Police
yourself. That would be impossible if you didn't know the identities
of students charged with drug crimes.

Does that mean that a name is necessary? Couldn't readers adequately
monitor arrest patterns if we had just said, for instance, that
campus police charged a white male 20-year-old sophomore economics
concentrator from Orem, Utah who lives in a fourth-floor Old Quincy
dorm? Well, yesaE"provided that there were no key details that we
omitted. Might it be relevant that, as a recent op-ed in The Crimson
noted, the Quincy student was involved in the Harvard College
Libertarian Forum, a group whose members have advocated the
decriminalization of drugs? In my view, it seems unlikely that the
University Police's anti-drug efforts are targeting students with a
particular political viewpoint. But you shouldn't have to rely on
your college newspaper editor to reach that conclusion for you. You
should be able to review the list of recent arrestees and decide for yourself.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, our readers should be able to
hold us accountable. You should be able to sift through court records
and assess the accuracy of our articles. And other newsgathering
organizations should be able to verifyaE"or second-guessaE"our
reporting. Indeed, after the LSD arrest, the weekly Harvard
Independent chose to follow up on our coverageaE"and to include more
background information about the Quincy sophomore than The Crimson
had initially provided. In order to thoroughly double-check our
factsaE"in order to search court records or to interview the
student's acquaintancesaE"it is necessary to know the student's name.

The Crimson's president, William C. Marra '07, wrote in this space
two Mondays ago that "journalism is all about trust." And readers are
more likely to trust our reporting when we include the names of our
subjects. But that trust runs in two directions. When we print that
Harvard officers have arrested an undergraduate on drug charges, we
trust that you will take that report for what it's worth: the
University has leveled allegations against one of its own students,
and those allegations have not been proven in court. It's certainly
not clear that the student is guilty of the crime for which he has
been charged. And even if he is guilty, we know some readers believe
that drug possession should never have been criminalized in the first
place. As reporters, we pledge to seek all the facts. We pledge not
to render premature verdicts. We know that you, as responsible
readers, won't either.

Too often, individuals are accused on the front page and exonerated
on page 13. If the Quincy student is acquitted, we promise to run
that news as prominently as we printed the initial charges. In the
meantime, we continue to trust that readers will use our reports to
monitor campus law-enforcement officialsaE"not to rush to pass
judgment on their peers. And we will continue to provide you with
thorough accounts of this case's progress through the courts.