The Muckraker Clarifies Statistics

To the Editors:

An article published yesterday in The Oberlin Grape falsely claimed that “counting” conducted by The Muckraker was inaccurate. In fact, it is the author of the article who has gone awry.
The author claims that The Muckraker miscounted Oberlin as #4 instead of #3 for alleged sexual assault. Had the author taken to read the article about which she is writing, she might have noticed that we do not claim Oberlin is #3 in alleged sexual assault overall, but that Oberlin is #3 for reports of “forcible sexual assault.” This is true; Kenyon had only four sexual assaults, while Oberlin had 10.
Contending that we made an error of such a gargantuan nature (as “We’re #3” was our lead headline on our cover) is a rather grave claim, especially if such a statement is clearly false. I encourage students, faculty, and staff to read the original article as it is posted on our website at www.themuckraker.com.
As an aside, it should be noted that the data which was compiled for the article was drawn from statistics collected under the Clery Act by the National Board of Education, a federal agency.

What I pointed out, unsolicited, in the interview for the article were the real faults of the article that have come to my attention. We did not take into account the sizes of the schools to which we compared Oberlin, and indeed, many of these schools are of smaller size. In short, it was not considered per capita. And while I stand behind the gist of the article (and our editorial), that Oberlin has good reason to believe there is a sexual assault problem, especially considering the wave of incidents last semester, I agree with critics who contend that we moved too quickly to sensationalize the story without first taking into account all of the pertinent facts.
Concurrently, I wish to apologize to College President Nancy S. Dye for characterizing her as being “on leave.” It later came to our attention that she had taken sick leave. Initially, her secretary, Linda Losneck, had written to us stating that President Dye was taking personal leave, and that was the information we published.

–John Byrne
College junior
Editor, The Muckraker