To the Editor:

I wholeheartedly welcome the push towards holding Lafayette College Student Government accountable through writing regularly about our work and initiatives. However, reporting should be done in a manner where due justice is done to the facts of the matter. Unfortunately, this was not done in last week’s article “Survey: Students find lack of student government impact,” which forces us to reevaluate whether such information should be shared with the newspaper in the future.

Take, for example, the chart on student opinion of student government’s effectiveness. The chart rightfully reflects that a quarter of the student body has a positive opinion of student government’s effectiveness, however, the rest of the chart is colored ambiguously grey. To someone who doesn’t have the numerical results, the grey area representing 3/4 of the respondents could be reflecting a negative opinion, which is not the case. Only 17 percent of the student body had a negative opinion of student government’s effectiveness, whereas close to 59 percent had no opinion.

I would hope the newspaper treats statistics with more attention to such nuances in the future, and reporting, even critical in nature, does not devolve into misrepresentation of facts.

Sincerely,
Bilal Akbar ’18
President, Lafayette Student Government