Fourth-year College student Kurt Hilburger died Wednesday after a car crash this weekend. His is the second undergraduate death just this academic year.
Undoubtedly, one of the tougher jobs of a college newspaper is to cover the death of a student. A student death isn’t just a headline; it’s a shock to a community — a community a newspaper aims to cover but also one of which its staff is a part. And a student death is, in some sense, worse than other deaths; after all, students are young, supposedly filled with life, at their beginning — not supposed to die.
Student deaths invite mourning; in such close quarters, people know each other, and the only way to make sense of tragedy — or at least to seek consolation when there is no sense to be had — is to come together, to strengthen the bonds that are the very reason the tragedies hit so hard.
And yet student deaths are also news. Not just because they change the fabric of the collegiate world: student deaths offer stories about who all of us are. They demand that reporters see a school’s collective pain, and in that sense the reporters' work brings a community together, too.
Usually, students die under circumstances that leave the living with questions. There’s always the profoundest question of why: why was this young life cut short? Why do some people live to be 88, while he died at 21? But often there are more practical questions of why as well: why was he in a car crash? Who was responsible? How did this happen, and how could it have been avoided?
It is a newspaper’s job to ask those questions, painful as they may be, and to answer them.
A newspaper is not a locus of mourning. It may provide consolation; to some, facts offer the surest balm. If we cannot know the deep answer to why, perhaps there is some solace in knowing practically why and how. To some, those facts will only make pain more acute. Those people don’t have to read.
It’s also a newspaper’s job to explain, regardless of how unsavory the facts may be. As this column goes to press, the story behind Hilburger’s death is still developing; I hope that in the coming days The Cavalier Daily will report on just how he died — and, of course, who he was before he died, and who loved him, and why.
The Cavalier Daily ought not to succumb to public pressure to avoid its duty because facts are ugly. Its duty is not to be a psychological healing ground. A related controversy struck the Yale Daily News last week, when that paper published new information about an incident last spring in which, after a threesome gone awry, a recent graduate stabbed a fellow student before jumping out a window to his death. (Full disclosure: I was once an editor of the Yale Daily News, and I know, however tangentially, some of the people involved in both the incident and the newspaper’s coverage of it.)
Some Yale students objected to the paper’s coverage, arguing interest in the threesome that preceded the stabbing and suicide was salacious and not newsworthy. To the contrary: that sort of information is precisely what a community needs to know, lest everyone live in darkness for fear unsavory facts might shade mourning. When a world is shaken, readers deserve to know what happened. But far worse than the objections was the manner in which they were voiced: readers responded with vitriol, bombarding editors with angry calls, and one offered a wish that an editor meet a terrible fate.
Such a response belies a deep misunderstanding of the purpose of newspapers — and a serious threat to the free exchange of information necessary for a democratic society. At the University, those sentiments have not surfaced in responses to these two most recent deaths. But even — and perhaps especially — if they do, The Cavalier Daily should hold fast to its duty to inform fully and honestly. Either way, the paper has its work cut out for it in the coming days.
The University has been rattled to the core too often in the last year, and did not deserve another tragedy. But it does deserve a newspaper that faces hard truth at every turn, undeterred by those who prefer ignorance and sad uncertainty to the firm ground only facts can provide.
Julia Fisher is the Public Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at publiceditor@cavalierdaily.com or on Twitter at @CDPublicEditor.
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