Building diversity on the Opinion page

The first place most people turn to when they first open up the Indiana Daily Student is usually the comics page. After asking their friends for all of the answers to the crossword puzzle and deciphering exactly what their horoscope means, people usually turn to the Sports or Opinion pages.\nPeople love reading the Sports and Opinion pages for the columns. They love to hear what columnists say and to argue with people's opinions. But before readers take in our well-crafted editorials, they look at the mug shots -- and I hate to use a cliché, but a picture is worth a thousand words.\nWhen I was a freshman flipping through the Opinion page, I always wanted to read the columns of people who looked nice. I would think to myself, "He looks like a creep, I'm not going to read that," or "She looks dumb, I'll skip this one."\nPictures color our judgment and one criticism the IDS constantly receives about our columnists is their lack of diversity as a group. This is an issue that can turn away readers.\nThe Opinion page has a tumultuous history with diversity. My freshman year we were criticized for an editorial cartoon that attacked affirmative action. Last year, a columnist raised controversy with a column titled "Black history month is racist." We are always accused of being racist or not presenting enough minority opinions. In truth, some of this criticism is warranted.\nThis week, we selected and introduced our columnists for the fall semester. When making the final cuts, we were faced with a very difficult question -- How should we weigh columnists' background in hiring them?\nOn one hand, we want to reflect the entire student body and we don't want readers to be turned off of reading the page. On the other hand, we don't want to hire columnists as "tokens" either. We don't want our columnists to be read just because they are black or Asian.\nIn the end, we lucked out. We didn't care what race, religion or sexual orientation they were while reading their sample columns, and in most cases we didn't even know. After finalizing our selections, we looked on facebook.com and found out we ended up with a very diverse staff.\nWe valued quality of writing and diversity of ideas, but since backgrounds can affect ideas, you eventually get a variety of people represented. We want all our readers to have columns they can relate to, so they have something that draws them to the page every day.\nNot all of our mug shots are in the paper yet, but when they appear, I urge all readers to look beyond their physical appearances and consider the quality of their opinions. Backgrounds can affect your ideas, but that's not all they are. We have a bright, outspoken and witty staff. I hope you'll enjoy reading them this semester.