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Putting The Crimson’s Editorial Board On Notice

The Harvard Crimson has failed us, and we have no one to blame but ourselves. And The Crimson.

When I was a student at the Salisbury School, a private suburban school in South-Central-South-West-Northerly Ohio, I took a lot for granted. My school newspaper, in particular, is something I should have appreciated more.

Last summer, I spent my first summer back home since starting college one year ago, and I made sure to read the school paper for the first time since graduating in 2014. That afternoon, I gazed in awe as a small handful of half-hearted teenagers wrote articles cheering on the marriage equality movement for the first newspaper issue of the year. In that moment, I realized why I am still so proud to be a writer for The Weekly Salisburian.

It is hard to be proud of The Crimson. Not the idea of The Crimson. I believe that it is the best undergraduate newspaper on Earth, or at least at Harvard. Not the readers of The Crimson. Folks reading it are among the brightest people that I have ever met. No, it is hard for me to be proud of how The Crimson is being represented by its editorial board.

Indeed, with all of The Crimson’s graphs, its printing press, its comp promos constantly touting its powerful alumni, during my first year it was tough for me to understand why people who read my high school’s newspaper seemed so much happier than people here. Why, after reading the school newspaper of my dreams, did I feel such discontent? It just didn’t make sense.

This sense of boredom, of feigned outrage, has been even more intense since the controversy erupted between Harvard’s administration and final clubs in the last few months. I have come to realize that, through their recent overly-emotional columns (and decades of equally overly-emotional columns), The Crimson’s editorial board have let us down as a student body by failing to provide us with tolerable pieces.

I am not a reader of The Crimson. In all honesty, this article is not even really about The Crimson. Rather, this is an article about how we as a student body must demand change from The Crimson. We must remind the editorial board that their duty is to not be insufferable.

The Crimson was founded in 1873 and will likely be around for many more centuries. But we are only here for four years. With this in mind, we must urge the editorial board to act now to provide us with less terrible columns. It is time for them to stop talking about creating a new culture of inclusivity and acceptance and to start taking real steps towards not descending into self-parody.

Image source: Daderot/Wikimedia

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