See also: Regents Professor Horner Marries Paleontology Student
In news coverage on page 4 this week, we have chosen to cover the recent marriage of Professor Jack Horner, MSU’s preeminent paleontologist, to Vanessa Weaver, who was enrolled last fall as an undergraduate paleontology student. That decision has been the single most difficult our staff has encountered in my time at the Exponent.
In printing the story, we intrude into the private lives of two consenting adults in a way that gives us pause. Despite the age difference — Horner is 65, Weaver, 19 — the marriage is perfectly legal, and he has, to our knowledge, fulfilled the requirements of MSU’s (rather vague) faculty code of conduct in acknowledging the relationship.
However, Horner, arguably MSU’s highest-profile faculty member and one of the best-known paleontologists in the country, occupies a unique position of public trust. Beyond his stature in the field at large, he plays a key role in our university’s program as the Museum of the Rockies’ Curator of Paleontology. As such, we feel an obligation to present the story — fairly, we hope — in a way that allows for public scrutiny of an unorthodox personal choice.
Furthermore, various online news outlets have reported inaccurate information about Horner’s involvement in Weaver’s education, coverage that has been spread widely via social media (and appearing, as of print time, on Horner’s Wikipedia page). Given the sensitivity of the issue, we feel responsible for helping correct the record.
In crafting this week’s story and its visual presentation, we’ve made a deliberate effort to downplay the story’s sensational aspects, focusing instead on the facts we feel are most essential to the public’s understanding of the issue. We have made a conscious decision to print the piece without an accompanying image, and to avoid featuring it on our front cover.
Furthermore, we delayed the story’s publication by a week so we could have the opportunity to validate our facts and round it out by both interviewing Weaver and contacting MSU Legal Services. In addition, we have deliberately avoided providing a history of other faculty-student relationships at MSU with the intention of giving the story’s facts space to stand on their own.
I suspect that at least some of our readers will see fit to criticize our choices here. Both our decision to publish a story on the issue and the specifics of what we’ve included in it have been topics of heated debate within our staff this past week, and I would expect no less from our readership. As is always the case, I would encourage readers to voice concerns through our letters section (letters@exponent.montana.edu), turning scrutiny on our coverage as well as its subjects.
Corrections:
The Jan. 26 Edition incorrectly identified Michelle Thomas as the author of the Badass Student of the Week. Credit should have gone to David Hoy.
The Jan. 26 edition also ran a photograph with a student-athlete profile that falsely identified Asa Stavens as Jeffery Mohl. The Exponent regrets the errors.
