To the Editor,

In response to the Daily Orange article “Here’s how Student Association chairs have advanced several initiatives over the semester.”

It is a recurring theme that when The Daily Orange writes about the Spring into Action initiative they fail to include the fact that SIA is a joint initiative between Residence Hall Association and Student Association. In fact, Spring into Action started as an initiative entirely designed and implemented by RHA. Furthermore, the articles are always written under the “Student Association” tagline.

Don’t get me wrong, we appreciate Student Association and their support in this initiative and others immensely. However, they are not the only governing body on this campus, and when The D.O. does this it contributes to the erasure of our student organization.

Additionally, the articles frequently state inaccurate information about the initiative itself. Spring into Action was rebranded last year specifically to not just be a weeklong initiative and to instead span across the entire semester because we wanted to do more meaningful engagement with the organizations in the city.

This information is also in a D.O. article from last year, which was written by this exact writer — Jordan Muller — who therefore should have recognized this error. Last year, there was inaccurate information placed into his article as well. It was written that the students who were at the North Side Learning Center were from the Middle East, which I never said and was also factually incorrect — the girls are primarily from North Africa — and had racist undertones in the assumption of Muslim identity. After asking for this to be corrected multiple times — it took weeks to be corrected which meant most readers saw the unedited version.

I understand that keeping track of information for a single initiative can be cumbersome, but Spring into Action received regional recognition at the latest North East Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls Conference for Commitment to Service and reflects very positively on the university and therefore deserves to be presented accurately. As the recorded second best newspaper in the nation, the D.O. should work harder to prevent these glaring errors in reporting because there is a growing consensus among some of the student leaders I’ve talked to that speaking to the D.O. makes them nervous because there is a fear that more misrepresentation will take place which is not conducive to the distribution of information on campus.

BreeAnna Poshek

President, Residence Hall Association

Published on December 6, 2017 at 6:25 pm