Opinion

From the desk of the editor

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Students do not age in years. We age in semesters.

Graduating from the university is not as important as the way we graduate from one school term to another, marking time with move-in days and midterms. Astonishingly, we’re back to build ourselves again.

So, in a student’s lifespan, inching to class and closer and closer to a cap and gown yields a kind of young old age. After eight semesters, I’m beginning to feel blatantly geriatric. Friends who showed me the ropes have towed away to real life or something like it. Every meal seems eaten yesterday. Aches prevail more than adrenaline, and spending all night doing anything seems daunting.

The newspaper performs a similar aging ritual. It molts every semester, and refeathers with younger and more exuberant minds. This way, it gets to adapt to its audience, its cortege, its moment. The changes for spring 2003 are subtle, if not invisible. This is not a revolution in journalism or leadership, but the paper has the advantage of tapping a pool of vitality not available to individual students. It does not confuse itself with generational shift, which is instead the mechanism of its renewal.

I found the other day I can no longer tell the difference between music videos and advertisements, an embarrassing phenomenon something like looking at old photographs. At first, theories abound about corporate influence and media convergence; there is an instinctive danger in manipulating the line between art and persuasion. Or worse, there is a danger in the critic who cannot tell one from another and leaps to condemn expression, saturated though it might be, and I cannot help but come face to face with my age.

Perhaps the beginning of a semester is like Mike Jordan’s latest Gatorade commercial, in which he confronts his younger, more airborne self. Experience facing innovation. At the top of a semester, we also converge on our history. As a newspaper, we turn over a page and the intersection of the sheet folds into the margin. As students, our youth follows us and we are just as aware of it as the decline in our vertical leap or the sudden and familiar confines of a classroom.

Cordially,

Lars Russell

Editor in Chief