Welcome back to another semester with The Badger Herald’s editorial page. We hope you had a pleasant summer vacation doing, well, whatever it is you were doing, and we hope you aren’t dreading the first week of classes too badly. As editorial page editors, we are looking forward to a fall chock full of pumpkin spice lattes, knit scarves and sometimes heated political disagreement.

This is your editorial page – we want to include your opinions in the ongoing conversation that will fill the page this fall. This section should be a forum for discussion, not a one-sided soapbox, and we encourage you to participate actively by sending us mail. We will be featuring letters to the editor on a regular basis this semester.

As with the rest of the paper, the editorial section will look a bit different than years passed. The most notable change is that we’ll only be publishing a physical paper twice a week. Our goal with this reduction in paper publishing is to free up time and resources to produce more timely, relevant and high-quality content both online and in our biweekly issues.

We will also be making The Badger Herald Editorial Board, the group that writes opinion pieces in the newspaper’s name, more inclusive. While we will still draw a core group of editorial board members from within the Herald, we are planning to have several regularly rotating at-large members from all around the community sit on the board. We hope to make the Editorial Board a place where people from across the political spectrum – or altogether off it – can make their voices heard.

And, of course, we’re always looking for new writers to join our ranks as columnists. There’s no prior experience required, just a desire to write well about interesting topics. It doesn’t matter what your major is, either. As proof of this (pun kind of intended), both of us are math majors. We want to fill the page with content from writers of all different backgrounds.

So kick back and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle. It’s highly unlikely you will agree with everything you read here during the semester to come, and if you feel your viewpoint is not represented on the editorial page, we want to hear about it. Our goal is to provide balanced perspectives, but we can’t do that alone – we need your voice.

Joe Timmerman ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in math and economics and Charles Godfrey ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in math and physics. They are the editorial page editors.