Serving with top Cornell University administrators on a secret committee whose task was to cut financial aid costs, Mitch McBride had a great responsibility: to represent the student body’s perspective on deliberations it didn’t even know existed.
By all accounts, McBride took the job seriously. A longstanding member of Cornell’s Student Assembly, McBride got his seat on the private committee by earning the trust of many Cornellians. But when McBride learned that the committee might recommend admitting only those international students who could afford to pay full tuition, his conscience told him that his voice was not enough. He believed that the entire student body, not just a select few who’d been handpicked by administrators, had a supreme
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16, 2017). Pivotally, Bogel-Burroughs also reported that the judicial proceeding against McBride would be public, per McBride’s request and against Cornell’s wishes.
Public interest swelled, and Sun journalists flocked. One day before McBride’s trial, Bogel-Burroughs reported that over 250 people planned to watch it (see Bogel-Burroughs, Apr. 19, 2017), and Sun senior editor Drew Musto published an article analyzing the provisions of Cornell policy that McBride was alleged to have violated (see Musto, Apr. 19, 2017). The depth of The Sun’s coverage, even before the main event had begun, earned public praise from former Sun editor-in-chief, Sofia Hu, who noted that previous iterations of The Sun’s editorial board had backed away from such controversial stories (see Hu, May 2017).
The day of the hearing, Bogel-Burroughs and Musto, joining around 60 other Cornell students, packed into a room where the public was allowed to watch the proceedings remotely. Despite The Sun’s best efforts, including a live-tweeting initiative led by Bogel-Burroughs, there was an immediate impediment to coverage: the University’s technology was faulty. With grainy footage and nearly muted volume, the AV equipment failed to convey to the public what was actually happening in the trial room. Outraged, students demanded better