Editorial: Ending on low note … or never ending at all

Best of the year: Four MAAC championships

When the men’s and women’s soccer teams won the MAAC tournament in back-to-back weeks, it seemed that Fairfield athletics was about to head down an unpredented path of success.

This spring, the women’s tennis team continued the trend with an upset victory over Marist in the’ MAAC tournament, while the women’s lacrosse team completed an undefeated regular season before earning a berth in the NCAA tournament this past weekend.

Many people seem to think that the athletics at Fairfield is not strong enough, but those people are simply looking in the wrong places. While the more popular sports, like men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse have not reached the NCAA tournament in the past few years, the soccer programs and women’s lacrosse teams have established themselves as the class of the MAAC.

With the softball team sitting in first place in the MAAC, it could be five championships and a Commissioner’s Cup trophy for Fairfield before this year is over.

Worst of the year: The Banner Bandit

When we came back to campus, we were all (hopefully) made aware that some administration monkey business had taken place while we were home for the summer. A ‘banner bandit’ or ‘StagWeb grade changer’ was discovered; a senior who apparently went into StagWeb and changed his grades.

When we spoke to Orin Grossman, the academic vice president, last fall, he said that the reason the administration had not completely taken the student’s diploma away was not only because the University was acting through forgiveness, but that the Fairfield handbook did not explicitly disallow hacking into StagWeb and changing grades. Explicit or not, students should be well aware that changing grades is an offense classed among cheating on tests or plagiarizing papers, except grade changing is much worse.

The professors who had this student, who actually were the first to report the incident, were the most violated in the situation. While they acted in a professional way, reported the grade change when they found it, they were repaid by the administration by being completely left out of the process of deciding the punishment for the student.

Yes, we’re Jesuit and forgiveness is an important virtue of the Catholic tradition, but this really made our community question how far our notions of forgiveness reach. Let’s just say, if The Mirror had been in Grossman’s place, things would have played out differently.