Dearest readers,
We begin this letter with our thanks. This semester, we’ve seen an incredible amount of engagement and discussion at The Argus. In our letter to you all at the start of the semester, we declared a goal of making this newspaper a forum for dialogue about campus issues, and we’re so glad that it’s been used accordingly.
Throughout the semester, we have seen students and staff reckon with major campus events, such as the creation of the anonymous Zine “Begging for Table Scraps” and the University’s response to a Title IX complaint against board of trustees Chair John B. Frank ’78 P12. In Opinion pieces, our staff and contributors have shared nuanced perspectives about accountability on the board of trustees, the dangers of the dark web, and privilege in the face of violence. The Features section explored the many iterations of the Public Affairs Center in the From the Argives column, as well as the resurgence of Students for Justice in Palestine. Our Arts & Culture section covered community art within the Palestine Solidarity Encampment, each of the five weeks of senior art studio theses, and the masterful performances in Samsara 2024. Our Sports section reported on NESCAC Championship victories for our underdog men’s lacrosse team and our five-year reigning women’s tennis team, as well as a slew of Little Three titles and players of the week. Our Food section, which will become a subsection within Features in the fall, brought us countless home-cooked meals, coverage of Haven Hot Chicken’s new location in Middletown, and even a definitive ranking of the best kinds of garlic. We are also thrilled to announce a new Science & Research subsection within Features, which will cover the advancement of science at Wes, and maybe even look at campus issues through a quantitative lens.
None of the 336,301 words in 332 articles on 252 pages across our 22 issues this semester would’ve been possible without our staff’s hard work. Beyond the writing sections, so many Argus staff work behind the scenes, from our lovely Layout team to our fantastic Photo editors, our caring Community Managers to our thoughtful Ethics & Equity Chair, our brave Distribution Managers to our pensive Podcast crew, our money-minded Financial Managers, and our courageous Copy Editors. And, of course, we couldn’t have done any of this without our incomparable Managing Editor Sophie Jager ’25.
And The Ampersand has been spicing up our printed paper with their amusing yet untrue content. We’re considering making this hilarious section available online, so watch out for updates next semester from, drum roll please….
Our formidable Fall 2024 Editors-in-Chief Caleb Henning ’25 and Carolyn Neugarten ’26, with future Managing Editor Phoebe Robinson ’25 at their right hand! We have every confidence in this team’s ability to lead The Argus to even greater heights.
In hopes of laying a strong foundation for them, we have worked to solidify, reinforce, and update our many internal policies here on The Argus. Both of us (perhaps because of our Argus upbringing in the Copy section), are dedicated to accuracy and consistency, and we’d like to highlight a policy that we started enforcing at the outset of our tenure, since the regulations are buried in various tabs of the Argus website: The paper does not publish Letters to the Editor that are submitted anonymously or by a group of individuals without at least one name attached. We hope this policy will help make the paper a place for healthy, accountable dialogue.
Now, as Anne prepares to face the great unknown (the Pacific time zone) and Sam prepares to hunker down for a Sisyphean task (a senior thesis), we leave you with a request: Never stop making news, creating art, taking titles, debating ethics, being funny, discovering scientific truth, or cooking good food. In exchange, we promise to never stop writing about it.
Yours in AP style,
Sam Hilton ’25
Anne Kiely ’24
Editors-in-Chief
The Wesleyan Argus
Sam Hilton can be reached at shilton@wesleyan.edu.
Anne Kiely can be reached at afkiely@wesleyan.edu.