On February 18, The Polytechnic published a story titled “Discount Program Planned” describing a project headed up by the Student Senate that was aimed at drawing more students to downtown Troy through well-timed shuttles and discount programs at local businesses. The project leader, Khaoula Benghanem, reported to both the Senate and this newspaper that the project was experiencing great success, and officials from a multitude of RPI departments and from the City of Troy were fully behind the effort. It has come to light recently that many parts of these reports were not true. Details that were said to be concrete were still far from finalized and, indeed, some of what was mentioned in the article was just not happening.
The Poly deeply regrets allowing this fabrication to make it to print before investigating it further. Each week, we strive to offer the RPI community the best possible report on what is happening around campus, and we do our best to make sure that everything printed is truthful and accurate. However, sometimes mistakes are made. When someone makes an active and calculated attempt to mislead the student body, the newspaper, and the Student Senate, it becomes difficult to catch false information.
We at The Poly have processes in place to make sure that factual errors like this are caught before publication, and in rare occasions errors appear. We sincerely apologize to the individuals who were affected by this error and to the community for presenting you misleading information.
