Former columnist responds to recent loss of position

TO THE EDITOR:

Regarding Michelle Jarboe's Oct. 12 column on my firing as a columnist for The Daily Tar Heel:

I should clarify that I disclosed my involvement with the Renewable Energy Special Projects Committee in writing to my editor and discussed it with him when he hired me in April.

As Jarboe wrote, I did sit in on discussions of the Conflict of Interest policy during the DTH's August retreat. I realized I should take a good look at the policy when I signed it, even after talking to my editor, but I was never asked to do so.

Given those failures on the part of my editors, Elliott Dube and Jeff Kim, it might have been nice to be allowed to resign from the paper. But I was not - and they then actually tried to recruit me to help them fire other potential violators.

The paper's attitude toward its staff's involvement with student government is indeed clear: Any level of official involvement constitutes a conflict of interest. This stance is as effective and as dumb as any other zero-tolerance policy.

Most externally appointed positions, such as those on RESPC, require applicants to be briefly interviewed and/or confirmed by members of student government. Often, those few minutes are the extent of their contact with student government officials, as they do not report to anyone, and simply go about their business with the Student Dining Board, WXYC board of directors or whatever obscure body they chose.

Many external appointees don't consider themselves members of student government. To flatly conflate their positions with compromised objectivity is lazy and incorrect.

The DTH is a great organization, filled with people who spend, as Jarboe wrote, "an unreasonable number of hours" creating one of the best college newspapers. But that dedication does not justify paranoia about staff's external involvement.

The paper's credibility did not suffer because someone on a renewable energy committee was writing a weekly editorial column about creative writing classes and diversity. If editors were worried that it would, then they might have added a disclaimer to the first column and solicited reader input on the matter.

Jarboe tries to create an analog between collegiate and professional newspaper-government relationships. But this is college, not the real world, and an overzealous attitude toward conflicts of interest serves the professional ethos of the DTH and its ambitious staff much more than the paper's credibility with its largely collegiate readership.

Robin Sinhababu
Senior
Political science

The length rule was waived