The Occidental Weekly commends the students we recently hired to write regularly as columnists for our Opinions section. We welcome Will Dean, Micol Garincol, Leah Gavron, Kelsey Martin, Karim Sharif, Jamie Stevenson, Katherine Torrey, Gabe Watson and Sana Vasi as our new columnists. With nine fresh voices who contribute nuanced articles to our Opinions section, we bring engaged Occidental student perspectives to the forefront, providing a more comprehensive vision of campus and national concerns to our community. We hope that the Occidental Weekly Opinions columnists will leave a legacy of quality writing and student voices free from fear of persecution or unemployment for later students to remember.
The day after one of the most cynical presidential elections in modern history, we must recognize that our newspaper is not limited by the confines that most newspapers face in the wider sphere of national politics. We wield power that is not limited by monetary greed, fear of funding cuts or anxiety over losing our jobs. The Opinions section especially is a place where confident voices frequently surge to the forefront, with over 5,500 online readers grappling with our words just last week.
Yet our Opinions section is small. While we try, we admittedly cannot cover every attitude on campus within the space allotted to us. We only publish four or five articles and an editorial each week.
This is a public invitation to faculty, staff, administrators, and students to use the Occidental Weekly’s Opinions section to elevate your voices. Whether you are frustrated that your chosen candidate lost the election or bothered by the high demands of the student body, we invite you to vocalize your political leanings, your impressions of Occidental and your airtight arguments.
In any newspaper, the Opinions section allows the community who reads and influences the paper the opportunity to get published themselves. Usually submitted in the form of a written prose piece, we are seeking strong arguments with clear theses and calls to action, that make members of the Occidental community think. Some have thought that the community who subscribes to the Weekly thinks that the Opinions section reflects the opinion of the newspaper. We’ve published many contrasting opinions; none of them reflect the views of the editorial board or the paper itself besides our editorials, which represent the views of the Occidental Weekly Editorial Board.
Pitch your ideas to the opinions editors, Bri Zimmerman and Benj Salkind, at bzimmerman@oxy.edu or salkind@oxy.edu. Include your broad realm of expertise and an argument, as well as the qualifications that allow you to speak on your subject.
This editorial represents the collective opinion of The Occidental Weekly editorial board. Each week, the editorial board will publish its viewpoint on a matter relevant to the Occidental Community.
