Created in the basement of a church in the 1960’s, Saint Ann’s was built on the idea that the children of poets and playwrights, most of whom happened to be quite wealthy, could be catapulted into Ivy League schools while still enjoying a freewheeling school culture that took a lax approach to drugs and sex, especially in the school’s early years.
That’s from The New York Times, in a recent article on my alma mater, Saint Ann’s School. Like others lately, the school has been investigating allegations of sexual misconduct, dating from the 1970’s into the late 1990’s. You can learn the results of the investigation by reading multiple news reports. Here’s one, with far more informative coverage than the Times piece.
I quote the sentence above for what I think it exposes about the article in which it appears, dovetailing with my recent impressions of unfortunate editorial tendencies in the paper as a whole. My thoughts are predicated on my total lack of objectivity. As an early Saint Ann’s graduate, a former teacher there, and the spouse of a former top administrator, I harbor some conflicted attitudes toward the immediate subject and the school itself.
So I find it startling and dismaying to encounter, in a Times news report on an important and painful subject, evidence of attitudes at least as conflicted as mine. One of the reporters is a Saint Ann’s graduate (a far more recent one than I). Problems with credibility would arise anyway from an editor’s assigning an alum this piece. They become fatal in the part I quote, which collapses into sheer nonsense, misrepresented as informative backstory.
It’s funny: one way to take the sentence is that it’s kind of parody Saint-Annsy — the sort of ironic witticism that people might imagine high-school students there making in an effort to skewer their own privilege with a display of knowingness. Everyone at the Times involved in writing and editing the piece knows that no assertion after the opening phrase can be supported as fact. People of good will may disagree on its effectiveness as a dig; as history, as economics, as demographics, as written expression, the proposition can’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny. A gleeful descent into absurdity trivializes a serious subject.
Yet I fear that the glee and the descent typify an emerging editorial approach. It’s possible that without satirical fabulation, this story, as reported more straightforwardly elsewhere, might have seemed to some at the paper to lack editorial interest, in comparison with recent stories on related issues at schools that don’t enjoy the notoriously freewheeling culture of Saint Ann’s. The sentence I’m quoting only takes to extremes a giddy irresponsibility marking the whole piece, as it deploys scattershot items ripped from the headlines, unconnected either to one another or to the story at hand. Its not just those supposedly sex-and-drug-addled kids of the rich, supposedly sleazing their way into Ivy League schools (in New York, not Hollywood, so these parents are rich … poets?). We also have the IQ test. There’s also a commemorative plaque. With a name. On a building. There’s even Lena Dunham. These hooks, tossed in with evident hope of driving widespread, emotionally triggered attention, not to the case under report but to the piece itself, turn the story into a keyword-and-metadata-driven Web page, embarrassingly overoptimized for page views in the outrage economy, more like a porn portal than a newspaper.
This is one of a number of recent stories, throughout the paper, that have given me an impression that editorial staff is encouraging writers to make these these clickbaity attempts at zingers, often fizzling, as here, and guised in the declarative syntax of news, to bizarre and misleading effect. The result, for this story: reporting by the tabloids was more informative than reporting by the Times. As a lifelong dependent of the notion that there’s some degree of maturity, judgment, and integrity to the paper I read every day, for information on issues I’m personally involved in and on those I’m not, I dissent.
William Hogeland 
Bravissimo!
The NYT reeks of intellectual snobbery, yet it routinely commits what I consider fatal journalistic flaws. As a former reporter and editor, I am especially sensitive to this pretentiousness in arguably the nation’s most widely read newspaper. Just for fun, I suggest going through any article in the NYT with pen in hand, and circle examples of second-guessing (mind-reading), predictions, anonymous sources, unverifiable assumptions, and damnation by innuendo, to name a few. I do this for amusement, and also like making cartoon balloons on photographs to indicate what the photo subject may really be saying.
This is one reason why I prefer print media, whether newspapers, magazines, books, or journals. Print must bear scrutiny over a longer period of time, whereas electronic information is easily changed or forgotten as soon as the screen closes.
Your article doesn’t explain how your impression of Saint Ann’s differs from the NYT account. I will check your links, but I’m coming to think education, as currently construed, is vastly overrated and overpriced and deserves a comeuppance.
OK . . .So I just read the links, and my reaction is “So what?” From my perspective, the school administration did what was necessary and even honorable, given the circumstances, and the NYT was trying to create a story where none exists. Demented men (and women) are frequently sexually inappropriate. Not to excuse such behavior, but it’s important for everyone to know how to set good boundaries. All the attention given recently to sexually inappropriate behavior will, I hope, raise everyone’s consciousness.