Yesterday was my final night as opinion editor for The Dartmouth. For the better part of two years, I’ve had the opportunity of working with incredibly talented editors, writers and student journalists, and I leave with nothing but appreciation for the tremendous work student journalists have done on our campus and beyond.
At The Dartmouth, as at college newspapers across the country, student reporters have shouldered the responsibility of covering the most urgent and complicated questions facing their campuses. They have documented protests as they erupted, investigated colleges’ entanglements with figures like Jeffrey Epstein and grappled with the increasingly fraught question of how deeply the federal government should shape the life of higher education.
At The Harvard Crimson, student journalists broke the news of the connections between prominent alumni and Jeffrey Epstein. At the University of California, Los Angeles, student reporters at the Daily Bruin have documented a federal Title VI agreement prompted by more than 150 reported acts of discrimination, including a troubling increase in antisemitic incidents. On our very own campus, student journalists were arrested while covering campus protests in May 2024. Student journalists have courageously placed themselves in the public spotlight despite the ever-present threat of institutional backlash.
What worries me is that people are becoming less equipped to value this work, even as it has become paramount. Our algorithms have become increasingly personalized and isolating and are designed to show us not what is most important, but what drives engagement — often inspiring rage, despair and a sense of helplessness. While polarization certainly follows, an even more insidious result is the lack of a common understanding of reality within the public sphere.
The erosion of an understood American identity may be in part due to this new media landscape. As Benedict Anderson argued in his famed book “Imagined Communities,” shared forms of media helped produce a sense of collective identity, which eventually gave rise to nationhood. In the days of print media, Anderson argues that people understood themselves as part of the same world because they consumed some of the same information, on roughly the same terms, at roughly the same time.
In America today, few media institutions still possess the power to furnish a genuinely shared reality. I would argue that campus newspapers remain among the last of them. Students may gather their political information from any number of places, each shaped by its own algorithms, but there is something indispensable about recognizable community forums where the reporting impacts a reader’s immediate community. At Dartmouth, publications like The Dartmouth and The Dartmouth Review are centralized sites of inquiry that provide the campus a coherence that is increasingly rare in how we consume media in everyday American life.
Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that some treat journalism “like a hammer to destroy the right people.” There is a certain allure to that idea, especially in moments of anger or moral uncertainty. Though what I hope people understand about The Dartmouth is that it should never exist to destroy people, but instead to pursue the truth, scrutinize power and create a public record that is fair, rigorous and unafraid.
While it may be difficult to see The Dartmouth or Review as occupying so consequential a role on campus, I would argue that the administration’s own behavior suggests otherwise. If the College were unaware of the power newspapers still hold in shaping campus discourse, it certainly wouldn’t pay a student to write in The Dartmouth’s opinion section.
I encourage students to engage seriously with the pieces they read, to discuss the arguments they find unpersuasive and, if they feel comfortable, to write something that articulates their own perspective. I have thoroughly enjoyed working for the opinion section for precisely this reason. It has affirmed my belief that a campus newspaper can be more than a mere repository for opinions, and I hope that The Dartmouth grows to be more than a space reserved for those whose views already align with the dominant currents of campus discourse and arguments already seen in the opinion section.
While I recognize that my vision of The Dartmouth is idealistic, it is rooted in the conviction that a college newspaper should elevate campus discourse and embrace its role as a public-facing forum within a self-governing sphere.
I leave my editor role proud of our work, not because we were perfect, but because I got to work with so many student journalists who take their responsibility incredibly seriously. Campus newspapers are imperfect, but they are also indispensable and remain among the few institutions still capable of binding a community to a shared set of questions, facts and arguments. That is worth supporting and protecting.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
