Cornell University scored a victory this week when a federal judge dismissed a $1-million lawsuit from an alumnus who accused the university of libeling him and disseminating private information about him online. The alumnus, Kevin Vanginderen, was angered that information about his run-ins with the law as a Cornell student were accessible on the Web via a Google search. The information was on the Web because the university library digitizes the Cornell Chronicle, a university newspaper, and a March 1983 issue of the paper detailed Mr. Vanginderen’s alleged involvement in campus thefts.
Mr. Vanginderen, now a lawyer, asked Cornell to remove references to him from the digitized version of the Cornell Chronicle. The university declined.
The judge, Barry Ted Moskowitz, of the U.S. District Court in San Diego, Calif., concluded Tuesday that because the news information about Mr. Vanginderen was mostly accurate, the university did not defame him.
The judge sidestepped the larger issue raised by the case: Are college libraries obligated to expunge embarrassing and false information about someone from their digital archives? Nelson Roth, Cornell’s deputy university counsel, said the university believes the answer to that question is no, and thus chose to vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit. If archivists “were required to go back and fact check information readily available on the shelf, it would bring digitization to a grinding halt,” he said during a phone interview. And Anne R. Kenney, Cornell’s chief librarian, said the library has no plans to alter its digitization procedures as a result of the case. —Andrea L. Foster
20 Responses to Cornell U. Prevails Over Alumnus in Suit Over Digitized Material
mbelvadi - June 1, 2012 at 7:09 am
“But commas are the convention, for better or worse. And it’s surely the case that if a comma is put before the state or year, one has to be put after it as well.” You were going along so well giving us a reasoned explanation, and suddenly we get this fallback to “surely it’s the case”. By definition, if you’re talking about arbitrary conventions, you simply can’t assume this kind of thing, just because it makes sense to you; that’s exactly the nature of “conventions,” that they don’t necessarily make logical sense.
marcleavitt - June 1, 2012 at 7:15 am
I think, all things considered, that we should blame most of this nonsense on late fifteenth century printers.
pnedry - June 1, 2012 at 8:06 am
Shouldn’t the period be inside the closing quote mark? As in, “surely it’s the case.” At least in US punctuation?
11182967 - June 1, 2012 at 9:50 am
Most of us divide the world into some version of two types of persons; For me, the division has always been between those who want to tell other people what to do and those who prefer that people learn to make their own decisions. The punctuation version of this division is between those for whom the “rules of punctuation” are strict laws to be enforced and those for whom they are conventions to be applied in a manner reflecting some combination of general usage and the desire for clarity.
Law-enforcers are proud to have learned the rules and unhappy when others don’t applaud their studiousness and follow their dictates; convention-appliers applaud their own ability to be flexible and operate on general principles rather than petty particulars. Law-enforcers are deductive, principled, rational and certain–think accountants, engineers, chemists, and Frenchmen (and Classical?). Convention-appliers are inductive, situational, reasonable, and skeptical–think humanists, social scientists, and Englishmen (and Romantic?).
The twain often meet. The inevitable result of the meeting is disgruntlement on the part of the law-enforcers, not so much for an inability to enforce their rules as at the realization that the convention-appliers don’t really care about winning as long as they don’t lose. I’ll leave it to someone looking for a thesis topic to classify the responders to this and any similar article about language (or any other manifestation of culture). But nothing’s more fun for a convention-applier than the frustration and suffering of unobeyed law-enforcers.*
*Well, maybe being a speeder who eludes an Ohio State Trooper.
anon1972 - June 1, 2012 at 10:00 am
How about “He used to be a redhead, now he’s gone completely grey” or similar? Since neither the Tea Party nor the Occupy movement is a formal organization issuing cards to members, your existing sentence makes little sense, in addition to arousing political sentiments that distract readers from the point at hand. Besides which, the reference will date quickly.
dank48 - June 1, 2012 at 10:04 am
“. . . I was told that what is correct is the construction I am using in this sentence. (‘however’ after the semi-colon).”
This complaint about the “however” usage is precious, coming from someone who misplaces the period outside the closing parens, leaves “however” lowercase at the start of the phrase (not a sentence, of course, but what’s that period for, then?), and misspells “semicolon.” Oh, well: the mote in my brother’s eye . . .
Off the subject, of course, one thing that bothers me, and has for years, is the “I was told” reason, more commonly phrased “I was always taught . . .” as justification for whatever the hell one thinks is correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and even spelling. In fact, most of us have learned what we’ve learned from a wide variety of teachers and books and so on, rather than from some monolithic, ever-consistent source of Truth, and we really should accept responsibility for our preferences, rather than blaming our occasional missteps on Miss Tearman in fourth grade or Mrs. Blake in senior English.
cerebellum - June 1, 2012 at 10:48 am
Aw, c’mon folks. Isn’t anyone going to comment on the title of this piece? Kudos for that!
I don’t begin to understand the arcane rules of grammar, but the older I get, the more fascinated I am with the controversies around correct grammatical usage. I think it’s liberating to see that well-educated people can disagree on what constitutes correct grammatical usage.
Personally, I’m still prepared to fight to the death for the right to use serial (Stanford) commas, currently out of vogue.
jaadler - June 1, 2012 at 10:51 am
“He used to be a moderate, now he’s a card-carrying member of Occupy Wall Street.” Shouldn’t that be a semicolon instead of a comma, since both clauses can stand alone as sentences?
11167504 - June 1, 2012 at 11:40 am
The writer is using it as an example of a comma splice–that is, a sentence that needs a period, semicolon, colon, or dash–anything but a comma.
11182967 - June 1, 2012 at 11:52 am
Apropos the title, I think it was Stephen Leacock who had a character who fell into a coma and later lapsed into an apostrophe on the way to a period.
Brian Abel Ragen - June 1, 2012 at 12:49 pm
I always wondered if the Communist Party actually issued membership cards. Does the Tea-Party? Does Occupy Wall Street? It wouldn’t seem to fit their ideology: Tea Party or OWS membership cards are like place cards at an Anarchist dinner.
So I would object to both the original sentence and the new version on three grounds: 1. Comma use. 2. Cliché. 3. Factual error. And I would consider the last the most important.
(Yes, I did start that last sentence with “And.” I did it to show that there is a wild man sharing this online persona with the anal pedant.)
katisumas - June 1, 2012 at 2:01 pm
I love the title of the piece……. Actually semi colons are the naughtiest. Is that why card carrying members of the hypocritical extreme right are preventing us from using them along with all forms of women controlled contraceptives? ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ha!
brozema - June 1, 2012 at 2:12 pm
I am puzzled that the NYT stylebook believes that “any” is plural:
“None. Despite a widespread assumption that it stands for not one, the word has been construed as a plural (not any) in most contexts for centuries. H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) endorsed the plural use. Make none plural except when emphasizing the idea of not one or no one—and then consider using those phrases instead.”
It may be plural (There aren’t any radishes here.), but that is still singular (There isn’t even one radish here”). “None are correct” means “Not any is correct.”
dmelia - June 1, 2012 at 3:08 pm
Since we no longer read aloud, the use of commas as phrase markers is being lost. Try reading something aloud that has had commas deleted. Not easy. Similarly, the problem with using “However” (the sentence-modifying adverb) to begin a sentence is that it signals a total stop to the prior argument or sentiment, as if you had said “But, to the contrary . . .” When used as a casual linking device to open a sentence (as my freshfolk often do) ”However” completely disrupts the flow of the writing. To de-emphasize “however”, however, just move it elsewhere in the sentence. (“The chairman, however, disregarded the motion,” reads differently from “However, [FULL STOP] the chairman denied the motion.”) Commas are there to help us decode phrasing and the like, not to be a fetish. The NYT, alas, is an endless repository of howlers caused by missing or misplaced commas.
dank48 - June 1, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Someone or other once used “But” to begin not just a sentence but an entire paragraph, and I don’t recall hearing a clamor about its being a problem:
“But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, . . .”
mbelvadi - June 2, 2012 at 7:10 am
Actually I argue in the computer age that it needs to fall outside, so that it’s always clear what punctuation is and is not part of a search, url, string of code, etc. However, I was inconsistent, granted.
mbelvadi - June 2, 2012 at 7:12 am
You’ve apparently never heard two Englishmen arguing about an LBW call in cricket.
mbelvadi - June 2, 2012 at 7:16 am
What will it take for the community of native speakers to consider “now” in this kind of context to be a conjunction? If you replace “now” with “and” or “but” it would be grammatically acceptable to everyone (if a bit weird in meaning). And it’s obvious to me that “now” is being used as a conjunction, and I for one am not so prescriptivist as to deny that it could ever be used as one. I still find “yet” a little awkward as a conjunction yet I accept it as, well, accepted.
mbelvadi - June 2, 2012 at 7:19 am
And don’t get us going on starting paragraphs with “So,”! (Admittedly this is more often done orally than in writing.)
dank48 - June 4, 2012 at 12:34 pm
My hearing isn’t what it used to be, and I had never noticed the “So,” phenomenon before. Now I’m hearing it all the time. I hope to heaven it turns out to be one of those irritating but transient affectations, eventually gone and unmissed.