There is no reason to fear the Bias Reporting System.

p. Recently, concerns were raised as to the nature and consequences of the BRS, in particular the apparent lack of accountability to which respondents are held. However, College President Gene Nichol sent an e-mail to the Faculty Assembly yesterday explaining that anonymous submissions of bias incidents will not be accepted.

p. Students’ names will remain confidential, but if the College decides to bring judicial action against a student, the accused student will be told the identity of the person submitting the complaint.

p. Despite recent outrage among students and alumni that included an Orwellian, full-page ad in The Flat Hat comparing Nichol to Big Brother, Nichol’s recent clarification should put an end to these criticisms. While the concern over anonymity led some to fear that students could take out personal vendettas against faculty and other students using this new online medium, the clarification by the administration shows that this is not an issue.

p. Furthermore, the system is by no means new. Students have always been able to report incidents of bias. The only significant change is that the process has been made more efficient by consolidating submissions online. The punishment process has not changed, and judicial action resulting from website reports will be conducted in the same manner as they have in the past.

p. Another concern with the new system was that records would be kept detailing names and situational information for each incident. Clarifications on the BRS website now indicate that only “a database of aggregated information” will be maintained by the chair of the bias incident reporting team, and that “personally identifying characteristics” will be omitted.

p. Perhaps some of these critics were unaware that there was a pre-existing system for reporting these incidents. In an age in which databases, information collections and archives have benefited by using the web and other electronic programs, it seems only logical that the College would collect reports of bias in a similar manner.

p. We applaud the College for making this clarification, as it seems that the debate was centered on a few misunderstandings. Students must have a forum for reporting offensive behavior, much as they have in the past, and the transition to an online system is a welcome and logical next step to the system already in place. Likewise, the College has made clear that only valid incidents of bias will be considered, and the removal of anonymous reporting should ensure that students will take the system seriously.

There has been much controversy over College President Gene Nichol’s decision not to publicly release his e-mail correspondence with former College President Timothy Sullivan. While it is true that Nichol’s secrecy is not helping his often-besieged public image, releasing the e-mails could be just as or more harmful to the College than their retention.

p. Consider: You are a high-ranking member of the College administration, maybe a department head or dean. Your boss, Nichol, publicly releases some of his private e-mails, portions of which appear in the newspaper.

p. How confident are you that your own e-mails with him might not also become public? Might this affect your willingness to discuss staff problems or other sensitive matters with Nichol? Might you start to believe it safer to not mention them at all, to leave them unsolved and unaddressed, than to risk their appearing in next week’s newspaper? Isn’t the ability to run an institution with a staff of thousands dependent on promising employees discretion and privacy?

p. This is strictly hypothetical for you and me, of course. But, should Nichol release the e-mails, there are quite a few College leaders and administrators who will be forced to ask themselves these very questions. And should one — just one — answer in the affirmative, the administration of the College, and thus the College itself, will be damaged far beyond the benefits of releasing these e-mails.

p. The Flat Hat and other newspapers are right to request these e-mails. Secrecy in leadership can be a terrible, cancerous impediment and the media has a responsibility to reject it. But these e-mails were also written as private correspondence, and Nichol is not just a public leader with public responsibilities; he is a private citizen with the right to privacy. The e-mails, it seems, are simultaneously public and private information. Which right trumps which — that of the public or that of the individual — is not clear, but both must be considered in this complex issue.

p. As the Nov. 2 staff editorial in The Flat Hat pointed out, Nichol would be wise to release these e-mails, as doing so “would clear his name and end some of the attacks from critics who have undergone extensive efforts to discredit Nichol.” I imagine that no one knows better than Nichol himself that releasing the e-mails would help his public image (not to mention end the legal ques-tion of whether he even has the right to withhold them).

p. However, releasing the e-mails would also irreparably damage Nichol’s ability to openly communicate with, and thus lead, the many important figures involved in running the College. I suspect that Nichol knows this as well.

p. I believe Nichol is likely telling the truth regarding these e-mails, given his honesty and humility in significantly more embarrassing cases, such as his admission that he was wrong to remove the Wren cross without checking with the student body first.

p. If I am right, then Nichol’s decision to withhold the emails can only hurt his public image while protecting the cohesiveness and efficiency of the College leadership. And what is a leader, if not someone who will engage in personal self-sacrifice for the good of that which he leads?

p. __Max Fisher is a senior at the College.__

College President Gene Nichol, to put it charitably, has a lot of folks giving him advice right now and, while I don’t necessarily want to rain on his parade, what’s another drop in a deluge?

p. As it stands, the College rates a ‘D-’ for environmental sustainability, every year churns out as much carbon dioxide as the entire nation of Chad and, in discussions of its response to both, most often elicits the term “laggard.”

p. When, then, will it finally be time to take action, to make a stand, to show our resolve by signing on American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment?

p. Certainly not now. Preferably never.

p. First and foremost, the use of tuition dollars for social activism, while evidently unavoidable, is troubling. And let’s not mince words — the fight against climate change is at its heart an activist movement. Economists fall on either side of the issue (discount rates, anyone?), but the rush to prevent Mali from becoming an annex of the Sahara or Bangladesh an arm of the Bay of Bengal centers almost exclusively on the humanitarian crises presented in either scenario.

p. Of course, the College can make both the business-minded and socially conscious camps happy by improving efficiency, but that would hardly sate the PCC and its acolytes. Climate neutrality, they urge, must be achieved “as soon as possible.” For as much as it gets touted, though, there’s no guarantee this meretricious mission would have a social or fiscal payoff.

p. To its credit, a proposal asking Nichol to sign the PCC makes a number of recommendations to increase campus efficiency (“greener” buildings, Energy Star electronics), but carbon neutrality remains the elephant in the room. Some of its other suggestions, however, such as lobbying Richmond to start buying the College green energy, bespeak a business model indistinguishable from shoveling cash into a furnace.

p. With our current electric bill of more than $3 million, the prospect of switching to green power, which costs twice as much, is frightening at the very least. Perhaps it would be more responsible to begin looking at the myriad causes that, dollar for dollar, can help more with less.

p. The fight against malaria is one such effort. Consider that the Stern Review — a British climate report that constitutes 15 of the first 25 citations in the proposal to Nichol — in its most liberal and academically criticized estimates, contends that in the year 2000 climate change accounted for around 90,000 deaths in sub-Saharan Africa.

p. Compare this figure to the anticipation that some 75,000 people in the same geographic area will die — every month — from malaria, most of them under the age of five. And closer to home, though the U.S. population is slightly more than two-fifths that of SSA, 112,000 die each year from obesity-related conditions. It’s unlikely Africans appreciate the irony.

p. Currently, the cheapest medicine for the microbial infection is cholorquine at 20 to 40 cents per course, but The Economist reported earlier this week that its effectiveness is rapidly waning. The second line drug is hugely expensive by comparison, on the order of about $5 to $8 per course. Outside money would help lower the cost.

p. Preventative measures exist, as well. An insect repellent-impregnated mosquito net runs about the same as one carbon credit, while also offering immediate, tangible and life-saving benefits.

p. It’s hard to fathom, then, how a mother in Namibia watching her child writhe feverishly could understand why we’d chosen to refuse helping her in favor of genuflecting before a movement unable to provide anything in her lifetime, or even that of her child.

p. Unfortunately, the fight against climate change has arrogated the status of supreme sociopolitical movement, no doubt because the effort’s evangelists preach an imminent and apocalyptic meltdown as the result of inaction. What will wilderness preservation matter if Middle America is once again the Great Inland Sea?

p. Atlantic University President David Hales, one of the PCC’s signatories, gives us an axiom to that effect. “If higher education is not relevant to solving the crisis of global warming, it is not relevant, period,” he says, eerily echoing Bush’s post-9/11 edict, “You are either with us or against us.”

p. It is time to take a stand of a different kind, to fly in the face of such heady proclamations and challenge the climate change hegemony. Carbon dioxide emissions are hardly the be-all and end-all of global stewardship, and bleating carbon neutrality is the opposite of a solution.

p. As one of the nation’s leading universities, we should resolve to seek the most effective — not necessarily the most popular — means of meeting today’s humanitarian crises. With that in mind, Nichol, responding to the PCC requires your paper shredder, not your pen.

p. __Andrew Peters is a junior at the College.__

**Disputed beard column**

p. To the Editor:

p. It is completely unfair and biased that you allow Charolatte Savino to print her slanderous reports against the bearded community.

p. I wrote a polite e-mail describing our position last week, and yet it did not get published. What does get published? Quotes used out of context and without permission defiling the good name of our group. This is unfair and wrong. Why is the good name of people with beards being dragged through the mud without fair and adequate representation?

p. Is this what The Flat Hat stands for? Unfair and unbalanced slander?

p. I certainly hope not, and you can prove this to me by printing this as a letter to the editor.

p. __— Zach Claywell ’10, creator of “The Official No-Shave November” Facebook group.__

p. **Response to Gazette editorial**

p. To the Editor:

p. The Flat Hat correctly points out in its Nov. 6 staff editorial, “Gazette report misleads,” that Susan Robertson’s conclusion in The Virginia Gazette is at the least premature and at the worst an egregious attack not yet supported by the facts in evidence. But you should be aware that journalists who tend to make this kind of mistake often know more than the rest of us and are acting upon information or sources they have not yet nailed down.

p. Their editor’s job is to hold the piece until it is properly backed. A classic case is former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee’s interaction with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their Watergate coverage.

p. The Flat Hat is basically right that, without direct and on-the-record statements or documents from the prime parties who have knowledge of the December interaction between such participants as College President Gene Nichol, former President Timothy Sullivan and James McGlothlin, neither The Flat Hat, The Virginia Gazette nor anyone else can draw any verifiable conclusion yet.

p. But, ironically, The Flat Hat then goes on and makes just as significant a journalistic error of its own in the penultimate paragraph of this editorial.

p. There is no reason The Flat Hat has cited in its editorial to exclude Robertson’s conclusion as a possible alternative explanation. Not to include an equally likely, if more unpleasant theory, gives a false impression of The Flat Hat’s partiality.

p. As a professional mainstream media reporter, editor and commentator for many years, I would suggest you might have done better to add the following to the end of the last line of that paragraph:

p. “Nichol may have lied about not knowing about the withdrawn gift and ignoring that knowledge in making an official statement that pretended that the College had exceeded its target six months early. The fact remains that until we have first-hand testimony or the documents The Flat Hat and others have FOIAed, we are not able to draw any of the conclusions above. And neither, so far as we know, is anyone else.”

p. In correctly refuting too early a conclusion, your summary opens up the possibilities. It doesn’t exclude any reasonable explanations and Robertson’s is one and there may be others as well.

p. It is also worth commenting on the clear fact that public servants like Nichol who do not volunteer evidence in their possession but have to have it FOIAed out of them are acting strangely indeed.

p. There is no reason for Nichol to drag the resolution of the current unhappy impasse out any longer, much less cast suspicion on his predecessor while hiding material documents from the public he is supposed to be serving.

p. Nichol may be innocent of the Gazette’s accusations, but these counterproductive, legalistic delaying tactics from a former law school dean cannot help but continue to generate reasonable suspicion.

p. __— Thomas H. Lipscomb ’61__