All quiet

I wish I had, as an English major, a place as communal, skills-oriented and professional as our school newspaper. There are few students I have met as driven as these. And I worry that will disappear.

It’s old hat, it’s old news and it’s perhaps irrelevant now, but the Media School is concerning.

It concerns me that our administration would actively take one of the top independent journalism schools in the country and just toss it into the College of Arts and Sciences.

Not that the College isn’t great. But it’s a very, very large college. And for a field as quickly changing, as competitive and as important to the success of our country and world, I worry that the small, serious group of students doing professional work in Ernie Pyle Hall — giving up nights and days for their work — will disappear.

This isn’t a school that is outdated. This isn’t a place that is dying. This is a place where people come to learn the essentials of how to tell a story accurately and truthfully, how to be ethical and how to be a professional.

It is only irrelevant to those people who don’t want to be held accountable. To those who want to have the power to do whatever they want without consulting those involved.

Because if we as the public and as the student body do not know what is going to happen to us, to our lives and our degrees, then we will never be able to stop it.
This is a call to our administration to involve openly the people it makes decisions about.

From moving Phi Gamma Delta to WIUX apparently without consulting them, to pushing through the Media School merger, to any number of projects to come, it is essential that our University focus on its strengths, on its students and its integrity.

I’d rather have one of the most successful “dying” schools in America teaching students hard work, passion and professional skills than a third-rate school fulfilling its own prophecy of irrelevance.