Playing hardball with your school

By Tommy Hamzik

We’ve dealt with a lot of access issues as student journalists at Elon, many stemming from the fact that Elon is a private university. Heavily redacted police reports are at the forefront of that.

So it was neat to hear from Hillary Warren, the adviser of Otterbein University’s student newspaper, about how they sued the university — and won.

Perhaps the best bit of advice I took from it is to play hardball, but to carefully consider everything beforehand. Warren said the lawsuit “is not the goal. The goal is to get the records,” and that’s really true. Sometimes, the means to get to that end is via a lawsuit. But don’t go about everything and every issue with a lawsuit in the back of your head.

Let’s hope things don’t come to that at Elon.