Comprehensive coverage

In response to Monday’s Focus article (“Lawn community takes shape,” 3/16/2009), I would like to comment on The Cavalier Daily’s coverage of this year’s Lawn selection process and its resulting statistics.

Past reporting of statistics from the Lawn selection process often only included the top 10 most represented organizations of applicants and selected residents. This short list failed to recognize and educate the University community on the diverse involvement of the Lawn residents, especially involvement with minority groups.

After living on the Lawn this year, I found this partial reporting an inadequate representation of the Lawn community. As Chair of the Lawn Selection Committee, I saw how this had negative effect on aspiring Lawn residents perpetuating unrealistic perceptions of the community.

When The Cavalier Daily requested the statistics from this year’s selection process, I advocated for the list of organizations to be more comprehensive accurately portraying the breadth of involvement of the Lawn applicants and selected residents.

As The Cavalier Daily indicated in the Editor’s note, the statistics were provided by the Housing division. These statistics were not computer generated but involved combing through the 251 applications by hand. Unfortunately, this challenging and time intensive process resulted in the unintentional omission and underrepresentation of a few organizations.

The Cavalier Daily accepted the challenge to present the community holistically with their comprehensive coverage of the various extracurricular activities. I would hope the University community can appreciate the efforts to capture this representation that would have been unlikely in the past.