Click the link to the right for the full PDF of the letter to the editor.
The Tan & Cardinal’s mission is to keep students and the community informed of what’s going on around campus — whether that be events, personalities, things that affect student safety and the like.
In this week’s issue, we have printed a letter to the editor from Robert Gatti, vice president and dean for Student Affairs, in which he refers to a recent article and editorial about public records laws and policies at Otterbein. We asked Vice President Gatti to edit this letter to 300 words, per our letter to the editor policy that is stated each week in the T&C, but Gatti’s full, original letter is available in PDF form on Otterbein360.com.
While we thank the administration for responding to these articles, we would like to correct an inaccuracy in the letter and reassert that although the letter addresses specific T&C policies, our main point is access to information and students’ right to know.
In regard to crimes on campus, the T&C’s goal is to provide students with the information they need to remain safe and aware. This information never includes the names, or even pronouns, of the victims and suspects in reported sexual assaults. We want to tell students what they need to know to stay safe. Yes, the campus police does issue a Rave Alert, but those alerts contain scant details and rarely provide follow-up information.
Without an incident report from police, which often describes the circumstances of the situation, sometimes we have to contact the victim of the assault to get the information we need to tell students. We do not force students to give us more information; we are only giving them the option. We might not need to contact the victim at all, however, if the Otterbein Police honored public records laws and provided these reports.
We would like our readers to know Vice President Gatti is mistaken about some key facts related to a past sexual assault that he said the T&C reported on. After conducting an exhaustive search of both physical and electronic archives, the T&C found no evidence of the 2006 incident Gatti refers to in his letter. Regardless, the current staff members cannot speak to what happened in 2006, and we can only pledge to our policy that we don’t print the names of sexual assault victims. This conversation is not about T&C policies anyway; it is about public information and students’ right to know.
The whole point of the T&C’s requests for what should be public records, is to make sure students have all the information they need, not just scant details. Also, the transparent flow of information builds trust in the law and in authority, no matter if it’s on our small campus, or in the state, or in the country. That, in our opinion, is what is in the best interest of the students.
