The Scrapbook’s expectations of student journalists are not super high (we were one once ourselves, and we had a lot to learn). So we’re always pleased when they rise to the occasion. One who did was Bryan Stascavage, a staff writer for the Wesleyan Argus, who published a column last month mildly critical of the Black Lives Matter movement. “I know many of us here at Wesleyan realize that most police officers are good people simply doing a service for their community, and that there are only a few bad apples. But those chanting to fry the pigs seem to have missed this message.”
Another who did was Idrees M. Kahloon, who last week in the Harvard Crimson memorably described what happened at Wesleyan in the aftermath of Stascavage’s column:
Among them: that editors attend a mandatory social justice training every semester and that a dedicated space be provided on every front page exclusively for marginalized groups. Until then, boycotters of the paper have pledged to destroy copies of the paper on campus. . . .
Opinion pages aren’t echo chambers. In the best of worlds, they publish original ideas, factually supported and logically structured, on any topic—especially those deemed unpopular to most. Rather than cater to the demands of the most vocal activists of the day or the values of the silent majority of their readership, opinions pages present arguments and viewpoints that uplift, depress, excite, and enrage us—not to comfort us in the righteousness of our own beliefs, but to confront them, their messy contradictions and shaky assumptions, head-on. . . .
It’s disappointing then that the Argus editors have largely acquiesced to the criticism, rather than forcefully denouncing its wrongheadedness. A front-page editorial apologized “for the distress the piece caused the student body” and its “position of power on campus.”
“We failed the community on Tuesday in many ways.” They promise to publish a “Black Out issue” written entirely by students of color.
No. There was a chance there to stand for something, for the hard-fought gains of the free speech movement that are now threatened everywhere from Michigan to California, rather than kowtowing.
The newspaper only failed its community when it refused to stand up for itself.
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. Kahloon’s column was headlined “Stalinists in Our Midst,” using a word sometimes carelessly thrown around but in this case perfectly apt.
