Until now, I have not written any follow up to my Feb. 11 column because I believe the role of a columnist is to raise issues and allow others to debate them.

But I now feel obligated to respond to Medill Lecturer and Chief Marketing Officer Thomas Hayden, who questioned my reporting in an open letter Monday. According to Hayden, at least three of his 29 students refused to speak with me, one “bitched (me) out” and another hung up on me. In a forum with students Wednesday, the dean echoed these doubts.

My editors and I stand behind my reporting. All 29 students in Hayden’s class denied saying the quote in the “Letter from the Dean” in last spring’s issue of Medill magazine.

No one refused to be interviewed. No student hung up on me. And no one, except for one student’s mother whose number was listed in the alumni directory under her daughter’s name, criticized or shouted at me. I ended up reaching that student by e-mail, and she denied being the source of the quote. (Twenty-six of my interviews were by phone and three were by e-mail.)

Much of my work has been re-reported and confirmed by Professor David Protess, Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune, and North by Northwestern, an online campus publication.

In Dean Lavine’s two columns for Medill magazine, he quoted three unnamed students. When I interviewed the dean, he did not provide evidence of the quotes’ authenticity, and he has not done so since. I find reason to be suspicious that the three quotes might be inauthentic, but we will never be certain.

REPORTING METHODOLOGY

In the interest of transparency, I believe it is appropriate to provide details about my reporting for the Feb. 11 column. My goal is to shed light on issues I could not previously address because my original column was limited to 450 words.

I first wondered about the dean’s unnamed sources when I read the Spring 2007 issue of Medill magazine. The wording of the quotes seemed strange, and I did not see why the students were not named.

Since I did not believe I was sitting on a breaking story, I did not begin reporting until the end of Fall Quarter, when I submitted my application to be a Daily columnist. I contacted several students to see whether they or anyone they knew took the class the dean referenced. I found one student, but she did not have a class list, and I waited until the start of Winter Quarter to continue reporting.

Not until Jan. 21 did I find a student who had the class list – it was on the back of a pamphlet students produced as a final project – at which point I started searching the Northwestern directory and the alumni directory for telephone numbers and e-mail addresses.

I wanted to call as many of the students as possible. I began with the five Medill juniors because the dean’s quote was attributed to one of them. I then moved on to the seven Medill seniors, and finally to the 17 non-Medill students. In most cases, I had to place numerous phone calls and e-mails before reaching the student or receiving a call back.

I searched for the hard-to-reach students on Facebook and sent them messages, friend requests and pokes over several days to get their attention. (I apologize to everyone who found that annoying.)

Since most of the students were seniors who have now graduated, I had to use the alumni directory to obtain their information. Several of the seniors in the course listed their parents’ home phone numbers in the directory, so I often had to ask mothers and fathers to help me reach their children.

Certainly, many of the students were confused about why I wanted to find the speaker of this particular quote. A few said they loved the class and agreed with the quote’s sentiments but were sure they never said those words to the dean.

The 29th student responded and said the quote was not hers at 7:28 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 27. I saved every e-mail and recorded the date and time of each call I made and received, as well as the exact words each student used in denying having said the quote. (Editors’ note: Daily editors have verified the columnist’s notes and emails to this effect.)

I took the first appointment I could get with Dean Lavine, at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 6, conducted a taped interview with him, and published my column the following Monday.

If Prof. Hayden makes public the identities of the students who challenged my reporting, I would be happy to show him my notes from their conversations with me.

Reach Medill senior David Spett at [email protected].