Deep within the pit of your average student reporter’s stomach is the fluttering of butterfly wings; spurned and buzzing to the beat of the nervous rookie reporter. This may seem odd to people outside of “journalist culture” considering half the job is talking to a stranger, but the feeling of walking into an interview is usually an awkward feeling—introducing oneself, explaining your reasoning for coming, justifying your questions after every inquiry. It can be quite daunting to someone awfully fresh to the game.
So imagine you are given an assignment by your adviser. The story is simple, a brief analysis on the university’s budget; focusing on the funds that go between sports and the arts. Imagine contacting the appropriate athletic faculty, including the vice president of intercollegiate athletics, a fine choice for such a story. You attempt to present follow-up questions to the staff, a norm in the journalism biz; all the while still remaining as cordial to the staff as the day you started the piece. Instead of receiving the same respectful tone, your attempts to understand the current athletic budget situation are met with a furious vice president. A vice president so irate that he makes no attempt to understand your situation, or perhaps any minute mistake you may have made along the way, and instead chooses to email the one person he happens to know in the department, exclaiming, “I am a faculty member, and I will file misconduct on every instance if these students are not immediately corrected.” Not exactly the teaching moment the university is known for offering, and how about that opening line; really fast balling some authority into something that was a simple misunderstanding.
This week we ran a story detailing this exact scenario— Frank Russell is that reporter. Fresh from his classes and looking to get some experience writing a longer comprehensive report, he took to the campus hoping to get the information he needed for an assignment. One misplaced email later and Frank finds himself in an awkward situation, being threatened by a faculty member over misinterpreting the words “staff” and “faculty.” In truth, these are the only grievances that Scott Gines, the vice president of intercollegiate athletics and Campus Recreation details in his email to the new journalist, and yet, threatens him with a charge of academic misconduct.
In the email from Scott Gines directly to Frank Russell, Gines states, “The questions you are posing that state you ‘talked with Scott Gines’ and ‘8 faculty members were relieved of their roles’ are not factual or true and falsely representative of my previous written answers to your questions. My recommendation is that you pose questions that accurately reflect the data you collected to date. I view anything shy of this standard to represent Academic Misconduct.”
That’s it, that’s what it took to insinuate charges of misconduct against a student—the fact that he used the term “faculty,” when the word that Gines was looking for was “support staff.” In a previous email Gines had actually mentioned eight support staff positions being eliminated. In Gines’ own words, “in response to some decreased revenue sources in 2017-18 I eliminated eight support staff positions.”
So it’s hard to believe that Gines did not know what Frank Russell was referencing when Russell asked, “8 faculty members were relieved of their roles and duties, what were those positions?”
Now everyone here at The South Texan would agree, he should have asked about the support staff, not faculty; it’s simply proper. But what everyone here at The South Texan definitely doesn’t believe is that a reporter should be severely punished for not understanding this nuanced, made-up, linguistic idea that faculty and support staff are inherently different. Because honestly, are they even that different?
Yet, instead of simply correcting Russell, making it a teaching moment at a university, a place that literally runs on teachable moments—Gines opts out and chooses to place the blame on some imaginary systematic error, as if the adviser had taught Russell incorrectly; telling his one journalism contact, “I do not know who is teaching this course, but some reigning [sic] is in order and quickly.”
Frank Russell was like any reporter going into a story, especially new to the job. He was nervous, on a deadline, and anxious to get it done. Being berated by a higher up like Gines seems more like a bully situation than Gines might understand, because had Gines just simply corrected Russell, if he had just taken the time to take a step back and explain the error to Frank, if he had just gone to the adviser instead of Manuel Flores, we could have avoided all of this. Yet, here we are, running an editorial on a faculty member at our own university for essentially threatening one of the university’s own students, when we all know he deserved better.