When Gilbert Adair predicted that journalism — like all other -isms — would someday turn into terrorism, he had likely never experienced the University of Wisconsin. Still, the British theater and culture critic might find a performance worth analyzing right here. As starry-eyed student representatives on campus surely know, hard work fairly transmutes into corruption. And this is no different in the adversarial media.

But which media? Graduates from Wisconsin’s journalism school, which can be as persuasive as Don Corleone, know the difference between plural and singular, but they may not know charcoal or chariots are as much media as broadcast or print. So if my job is to enforce clarity by elaborating on the distinction, I suppose that’s an offer I cannot refuse.

Not yet.

When I speak about media, just like those rosy-glassed journalism grads and the pencil pushers at the La Follette School, I mean those consternating scribes dodging salad bars and mustard spots between the audience and the stage. That media is diverse. If not diverse enough for satisfaction, it’s diverse enough to be adversarial.

Why do we tolerate contention among our mediators, especially if it taints and terrorizes like Mr. Adair says? Perhaps that is because of the way this media business began.

Take the Book (a translation! the complaint line is 257-4712 like its always been). Long before the Book was a codex, it came together the way all books of the age came together: texts ordered by some arbitrary editor — maybe a redactor or several. It might have been as easy to view those texts bundled together as a whole library, except they did not have the Internet so it became a book. The Book was selective, but it contained relevant and diverse interpretations of The Times.

If every culture has its Book, and each is not a written text, it means all cultures have a Book. Unfortunately there are so many stories — and more written every day, including at The Badger Herald — this book needs many editors. Some of those editors believe different things about the Book, and they become adversaries. It’s all media, and all the world really.

Fortunately we are learning, especially those of us here at The Badger Herald, but especially those of us at University of Wisconsin, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum (translator please!). I am glad about my part in this education, happy about my chance to edit part of the Book. I am worried but unapologetic for my part in corrupting the media, because terrorism is actually just another part of the Book. Perhaps someday that will be its conclusion. The editors are still working.

This newspaper has never been about confining media. It began as a new avenue for information in Madison. The newspaper can still be anything it wants. It can be a movie, unless the Godfather objects to the company. But the newspaper will maintain. It abides.

For me, this is not “Farewell.” It’s “Later on.”