Catholic U Hiding Campus Crime Report from Prospective Applicants?

Copies of a student newspaper bearing a front-page story on local crime disappeared from racks in front of Catholic University's admissions office the same day that hundreds of prospective admits toured campus, the Associated Press reports.

The Tower's report on a string of robberies and carjackings near and on the CU campus appeared in its Friday edition.

Editor in Chief Kate McGovern told AP that one of her editors learned during the day that a stack of 100 newspapers placed in a rack near the admissions office had disappeared. When editors asked University staff what had happened, they were told that readers must have taken them. When McGovern went to the admissions office to follow up, she was given about 20 copies of the paper and told that the remaining copies would be returned to the stack on Monday.

McGovern told AP, "We knew that people weren't going to be exactly excited about the fact that our lead story was going to be about the crime on campus."

A Catholic University spokesman denied that the school was trying to hide information about crime from prospective students. He told the Washington Post that even if the papers had been removed from the rack by the admissions office, there were many other campus locations where visiting students could get a copy.

Source: "College Editor Fights for Newspaper," by Ashton Williams - AP, April 24, 2006