Most students who picked up last week’s The Maroon wouldn’t have finished unfolding the paper before they noticed the first headline declaring, “Student arrested on rape charge.”

“Well surely they must be talking about a Tulane student or something,” a reader might have thought, until of course the article proceeds to inform us that the student does, in fact, attend Loyola University. The article was actually very good about being informative, going on to supply readers with the arrested student’s name, a photo and a description of the night’s events that goes a condom too far, in my opinion.

Actually, the amount of information given about the student has definitely been a main point of contention between readers and The Maroon staff. Editors have noted that they simply cited the police report verbatim. However, it seems that an interesting, accurate and tasteful article could have been written – all morning-after events included – had the student’s name simply not been mentioned.

Even the intentions behind the placement of the article itself are questionable, and I’m not just talking about the fact that it was placed directly next to a story about the recent Take Back the Night event that took place a short while ago; rather, why was the student’s arrest the very first story printed on the very front page?

Consider an example taken from the Crime Watch section from the same issue: “On Oct. 15 at 12:23 a.m., a student kicked the side of a vehicle at the corner of St. Charles Avenue and Broadway Street and has been charged with criminal damage.”

Surely a student who was arrested for something as sensitive as rape deserves the same amount of anonymity that someone who was actually charged with a crime, or found drunk, or found in possession of marijuana, received?

Though there is always some curiosity when an unnamed student is mentioned in The Maroon in relation to something criminal, I always assumed that the nonspecifics were used to shield the offending students from becoming pariahs to the Loyola community. This is clearly not the case, and there is a major question that is posed as a result: At what point does a college newspaper’s obligation to report the facts infringe upon the rights of students?

I say that point can be measured by multiple factors, which include but are not limited to, the nature of the crime and its specifics; the potential for embarrassment of the accused; and the date of the article’s release in relation to the availability of information about the outcome of the case.

Using these three simple parameters, I would say that an appropriately-written piece, regarding a potential student rapist would not have included the student’s name or photo, would not have been a front-page story, and ideally would have been limited to the same details as the other crimes on the Crime Watch page, a limitation that is entirely acceptable and advisable considering the relatively small size of our student body. Loyola is not a city, The Maroon is not The Times-Picayune and Dylan Rosevear is not a random nobody that we will never run into.

Only after the trial might this case have deserved an entire article, which as a result would have instead been headlined, “Student found guilty/innocent on rape charge.”

Chad Carlile can be reached at

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