Late last month, I had an eye-opening experience.On March 28, the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences hosted an on-campus symposium titled "Justice Begins at Home: Building Brandeis-Waltham Community Partnerships." The goal of the symposium was to alert faculty and students to the fact that the community of Waltham can be a wonderful teaching arena-and that there are, just beyond Brandeis' metaphorical gates, countless opportunities for students to become engaged with the cultural, legal, and social issues that animate life in America today.

I don't actually know whether the symposium was covered by the Justice. The gathering occurred on a Wednesday-after that week's issue of the paper had already been published- and because the following week was Passover, there was no edition of the Justice on April 3. Of course, a quick e-mail to editor in chief Rachel Marder could clear things up for me, but for rhetorical reasons, I prefer to remain ignorant as I sit here at my desk, writing this week's column.

I repeat, I do not know if the Justice covered the symposium on March 28-but I do know that the Justice has not covered many of the activities highlighted at the symposium-partnerships that have already been built between members of the Brandeis community and people living in the greater community of Waltham.

I was surprised and delighted to hear current and former Brandeis students talk at the symposium about the middle school classrooms they've been teaching in, the affordable housing alliances they've been volunteering with, the recent immigrants they've been interviewing and the physically and emotionally abused women they've been both advising and learning from.

A review of every issue of the Justice published this academic year reveals that none of this engagement with the Waltham community has been reported on by the paper. Indeed, with the exception of a handful of articles about clubs that have used on-campus activities to raise money for Waltham-based service groups (an important, but somewhat less "engaged" form of town-gown partnership), the Justice has run just two stories that highlight student forays into the city of Waltham: a piece on Sept. 5 that focused on two members of the Class of 2008 who have opened a shop in town that specializes in backyard pond-building, and a piece on March 27 that reported on 70 students who marched from campus to the corner of Main and Moody Streets, passing out fliers meant to raise awareness about poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.

To be fair, Waltham's own Daily News Tribune has not done a stellar job of covering student involvement in the Waltham community. To read that newspaper, one might think that Brandeis students do very little with their days except play sports. But this misleading perception-to me, at least-seems like an opportunity for another Brandeis-Waltham partnership. Reporters, after all-be they professional or student-can always use help in finding stories.

Many Brandeis students are already a part of the community of Waltham, as the symposium on March 28 revealed-and their activities are certainly fodder for news coverage, on campus and off. University officials would like to see more students identify with the community their college exists in, and Waltham Mayor Jeannette McCarthy made it clear at the symposium that city officials would be delighted to welcome Brandeis students into their community. As I have said before in this column, news outlets can be a marvelous venue for fostering community identification, and reporters at both the Justice and the Daily News Tribune, therefore, are uniquely poised to encourage the kind of community engagement that city and university officials seek. They need to talk to one another, though.

The ombudsman serves as the readers' representative, writing a regular column evaluating the newspaper's journalistic performance. Prof. Maura Farrelly (AMST), the director of the journalism program and a former broadcast reporter for Voice of America, can be reached at farrelly@brandeis.edu.