An arrogant bunch, we are. We sit here on our grandiose soapbox, watching the world flow by and passing judgment when and where we feel like it. We are in the position of power: we have a monopoly over our audience, and we can choose to ignore criticism as we please. That autonomy is something that we often take for granted; we, as the human race, have ruled this lonely planet of ours virtually unchallenged for millennia.
And with that, I’ll ask an honest question—how many people reading this thought that I was referring to The Poly until the last sentence? To be fair, the analogy does fit in many ways. We have a tremendous amount of liberty in what we print, and there is no other major student newspaper on campus. Above all, we are almost entirely self-regulating; aside from some financial oversight, we, as a student media organization, are completely responsible for the content that appears on these pages every Wednesday.
The comparison to humanity goes even further, however, because we make mistakes just as easily as everybody else. Fallibility is a part of life, and like everyone else, we fall victim to mistakes both large and small, no matter how hard we try to catch them before they go to print. We make typos and sometimes accidentally cut off part of a story—and that’s on a good day. There are times when our facts are completely wrong, and a slip of the pen will occasionally change the meaning of someone’s column entirely.
There are some media organizations that will do this consciously, but I am proud to say that this is not one of them. We strive to present content that is both accurate and fair while being interesting at the same time. Unfortunately, we screw up sometimes.
Last week, the “Top Ten” had an entry that could easily offend. In fact, it did just that—see the letter from Schlichting on page 10 for an example. Now, that particular feature of The Poly is intended to be humorous and should certainly be taken tongue-in-cheek. With that said, sometimes the satire is not entirely clear. The reference to learning Chinese was meant to poke fun at an issue on campus—that of the language barrier between some teaching assistants and their students—and was not designed to be an affront to any particular ethnic group.
Regardless of our intentions, we obviously raised someone’s ire, and for that I am sorry. I think this should go without saying, but we are neither racist nor sexist, nor do we encourage such stereotyping or discrimination of any sort. It is, of course, inevitable that we will sometimes unwittingly step on someone’s toes in trying to make pointed humor, and there is nothing to be done for it but apologize and try harder to avoid it in the future.
On that somewhat dour note, I suppose I’ll end with some shameless self-promotion. Like always, we are looking for new members. We are working on several things internally that will hopefully make this a better publication overall. In particular, we are looking forward to new designs for both our print and electronic editions—I encourage anybody with an interest in graphical layout and visual communication who would like to help out by contacting us at poly@rpi.edu. Of course, even if that isn’t your cup of tea, we can use your help in other areas. E-mail us or stop by our office on Tuesday nights for some pizza and see what we do.
