With all of the scandal and uproar surrounding State College, Pa., college students and professors across the country have been asking, “What if that happened here?” Of course, it is just a hypothetical question, one that seems to be far away from ever becoming a reality, especially in a small town like Ashland. But it’s an event that makes perspective important and shows just how crucial communication, ethics and the truth really are.

While we believe that Ashland would never have something like the Penn State incident happen, there are several things that Ashland students can confidentially say get covered up here at AU. A large running joke amongst students is that no one at Ashland gets fired. The many faculty members, staff members and administrators that stop working at AU over a student’s four or more years here, do just that: stop working at AU. They depart from AU, they resign, they need to spend more time with their family; they are never let go or fired. We are pretty sure that at some time, somewhere in history, AU has fired someone. No university is lucky enough to just have all their teachers and staff leave happily and at the right time.

Why don’t we fire anyone at AU? Because it’s negative? Because we need to focus on what is working? Because we don’t want to give off a bad impression? Aren’t those all the reasons that no one at Penn State said anything about the molestations happening on their campus, sometimes in their showers? Should we be worried? What else won’t AU talk about?

That’s a lot of questions. We can try to answer some of them. Working for the campus newspaper allows us to see just how frustrating and poor communication on campus can be at times. The idea that saying nothing is better than saying too much is a rule that seems to govern this campus. We are sure that many other campuses adopt the same policy too but we go here, so that’s what we will talk about: What else won’t AU talk about?

At the beginning of the year, one of the stories we ran was about a potential volleyball player who signed a letter of intent to come to AU and then was later told that, due to failure to communicate on her part, her athletic scholarships were revoked. This is a story that needs to be reported. Every other newspaper in the area covered it, why would the campus newspaper be expected to do less? That would be unprofessional of us. However, when our sports editor tried to get both sides of the story, AU wouldn’t talk about it. There are reasons to not talk about a story like this. There was a potential law suit being talked about, plus we have all seen the movies where a lawyer advises his/her client to not say anything, for fear of saying something incriminating. However, Ashland continued to say that they had done nothing wrong.

Ashland also continued to refuse to give a statement about the incident. We ran the story because that is what a good newspaper does: it gives the truth, good or bad, to its audience, which for us is the student body of Ashland University. So it was rather funny when, at a later date, our sports editor was told that he shouldn’t have written a story like that, because it makes AU look bad and potential students could see the news and decide not to attend our school. For us, the way to solve this potential problem is simple: tell your students the truth, the unclouded, uncensored truth. Or, accept that these stories will run and continue to refuse to comment. Which option makes it look like you want to be honest with your students? Which earns more trust? Which is better communication? Which represents your university the best? Which looks less like a cover up?

That’s a lot of questions again, isn’t it?