Hey folks, we’re The Campus.
We’re not that bulletin board up in the Campus Center where ACCEL posts job fairs.
We’re not the Chompergram or the My Allegheny daily update or the People and Places monthly e-mail.
We don’t provide space along our pages for you to hang posters telling Julie to Keep on Komping or to wish Mark a happy birthday.
We will not give voice to your spam, tape to your flyers, or space to your self-promotion.
Recently, an increasing number of groups on campus have come up to us asking if we could write a news article publicizing their event or if they could run an ad for free on our pages or if they could write an op–ed simply to support their organization’s project.
Sorry, folks, but the answer is unequivocally no.
We are flattered that you consider us so widely read that we can offer publicity for your group, but we are not a publicity tool, we are a newspaper.
And in offering free publicity — from the big things, like running your ad, to the little things, like letting you write an opinion piece with a clear agenda — we do a disservice not only to ourselves but also to the campus as a whole.
The Campus is here to print news, to inform you, to make you think and to ask and answer questions for you.
The Campus is not here to act as a disseminating vehicle for personal propaganda.
If we allow stories to be written for any other reason than sharing important information — sharing the truth—with the campus, we lose our credibility and you have every right not to trust a word we print.
Don’t worry; we’ll always have space on our pages for you.
We’ll always have space for your unusual combinations and your impressive initiatives and the questions you want answered and the opinions you want heard.
That’s really what we are; our pages would be blank without you.
But in our best interest, and in yours, please consider this next time you ask us to print a story for you: is this something that widely affects the entire campus, that everyone should know about, that you feel personally very strongly about, or is this just for your group?
Is your request in the name of publicity or in the name of the truth?
Maybe we take ourselves too seriously. But we want you to take us seriously too, so we have to be serious about this.
We love you and your groups and your interests and your unusual combinations, and we want to share all of that with the rest of the community.
But we’re not going to do it simply because you want us to — we’re going to do it because we think its something the college needs to know.
Please, keep coming to us, knocking on our doors and texting us at midnight and accosting us in the hallways with things you think belong in The Campus—but don’t take it for granted.
And unless the entire college really, urgently needs to know that you’re rooting for Julie to Keep on Komping, please respect our integrity, and don’t ask us to print it in our pages.