To whom it may concern,
As hardworking, school-spirited editors of this newspaper, we don’t have it very easy. Our job sees us having to wrap our heads around creating five total pitches weekly, and even worse, having to talk about them, too. We then have to painstakingly wait on these dumbass writers to deliver us the articles we pitched earlier and cross our fingers that the articles we have are somewhat usable. Afterwards comes the editing, where we spend whole minutes finding rogue commas and removing every Oxford one by hand. The whole thing then has to be wrestled into a layout (we, like, barely use the templates they give us) that can become the newspaper you know and love.
If all of this work didn’t sound exhaustive enough, throughout the past year we’ve had to be flung around campus by an administration that has it out against us, with each move getting worse and worse. When I first started writing for The Collegian, the pitch meetings took place in a luxurious office space inside Oliphant Hall. Contrary to what some other editors may think, the area was actually incredibly spacious and provided us ample room to do our very important and stressful ideating in. We were then moved to the library of the law building earlier last year, which was pretty suitable for what we needed. We got ourselves settled in and made the library our own creative expanse, even if the law students couldn’t appreciate that means a little music in the library sometimes (DORKS!).
At the start of this year, us editors were informed that yet another strenuous move would be taking place, this time to Kendall Hall so we could work closer with TUTV. Although skeptical at first, our time in Kendall so far has been honestly kind of great. The atmosphere with all of the TV equipment in the room makes Monday pitch meetings feel as incredibly crucial as they really are, and TUTV have been very accommodating with working in the same space as us. We’ve even started to decorate and hang our “Live, Laugh, Love” posters on the walls of Studio B (which the TUTV people loved btw). The editor-in-chief of The Collegian, Haiden Oogstra, upon seeing the posters, stated, “I haven’t felt this moved since Pearl Harbor; The Collegian finally has a home,” and I happen to agree with him.
So naturally, we received a message from the administration about our current accommodations last week. Recent DOGE cuts mean we have to move away once more to a new space, this time in the middle of the Algerian desert. There, admin can watch us toil away on our articles in the beating Sahara sun. According to the email sent to us, “The university can only allocate enough funds for The Collegian to operate out of one of its existing off-campus properties. We believe our thirty-square-foot Algerian Tar Shack should suit any of your needs.” We had some obvious questions after this: Why does the university own a tar shack in the middle of Algeria? What even is a “tar shack?” Which state is Algeria in again? Whenever we came forward with these concerns, we were only told that “the shack is in a great locale.”
This is our plea to you. Please reach out to the university’s administration in any way you can and tell them to let us stay! All we ask is to be allowed to stay with our beloved posters in our new home. Don’t let them take us away to Algeria.
If this change does end up going through, you can reach out to us by taking the nearest flight to Algiers, and from there catching a bus to Djelfa, where you can then follow a dirt road 50 miles to a sugarcane farmer who will guide you to The Collegian’s new tar shack.
in solidarity,
The Editors (honestly represented by Variety Editor Alexander Raza)
