By The FirstAccording to The Post Millennial, the editorial board at New York-based liberal arts school Vassar College issued a retraction to a story published last month. The reason —the article featured too many quotes from white students.
“The editorial board for The Miscellany News, Vassar College’s student newspaper, issued the retraction on Wednesday, on a piece centered around former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson’s withdrawal from giving a commencement speech this year. Johnson had reportedly decided against speaking after he received campus pushback on his border deportation policies,” PM reports.
“In this article, we attempted to include a variety of quotes from students describing why there was protest to the announcement of him as speaker in the first place, and the students’ reaction to his withdrawal,” the editorial board wrote.
“The majority of our quotations came from white students and therefore we reduced the positions of students of color to a singular, tokenized perspective. After this was brought to our attention, the paper decided to remove the article online in an attempt to prevent further harm among the communities we misrepresented,” they wrote.
“Our article exemplifies many of the institutional flaws and structural problems within our paper. Journalism, including college journalism, has historically been a white-centric, often elitist field, and The Miscellany News is not immune to the consequences of these structures,” they said.
