We attended the latest Board of Trustees meeting via zoom webinar on March 8th and discovered that certain members of the board are regular readers of the CPJ. This delighted us! We have always viewed the CPJ as a gathering place for student voices. If you want to get a sense of how people are feeling on campus, reading the opinions published in the CPJ can be a great start! Another way to engage with student voices on campus is to attend events, club meetings, and social hours. Any Board of Trustee member is welcome to come to a CPJ staff meeting to see what the process looks like!
At the board of trustees meeting, the board chair, Karen Fraser, read sections of a piece titled “Begonia” published in the last issue of the CPJ in remembrance of Jonathan Rodriguez. We noticed that the sections from which she read were not the ones that criticized the administration or voiced frustration, but rather the phrases that were poetic and removed from criticism. The omission of Begonia’s prefacing statement and sections that include anything resembling anger or criticism felt cherry-picked. Ask yourself, Who was that for? What was reading a few nice sentences at the meeting for? Was that for the students listening? Was that for the board and staff? Please consider this, genuinely.
Right now at the CPJ we are all feeling the pressures of week nine. We all have final projects, essays, and are racking our brains on what programs to take next quarter. The catalog selection feels slim, by the way. We are all stressed out, burnt out, but here we are spending our weekend working on laying out the student paper. It is our job, yes, but we do it because we care. We actually expanded this issue by 4 pages to accommodate for the amount of content.
Thank you to our readers for continuing to pick up the journal, and thank you to the members of our community who are brave enough to take their thoughts to the printed page. (Shout-out to the author on page 14 for expressing an opinion shared by many here on the staff and among our circles.) Thank you to the students who have attended the CPJ Job Shadowing Workshops these past few weeks to learn more about what it takes to work at the newspaper. To the folks we haven’t met yet, be sure to look out for another job shadow opportunity at the CPJ! Our first one will be WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17th, 2:30-4PM. We are still working to introduce interested writers and artists to the newspaper space and see if working at the CPJ next year would be a right fit!
See you out there!
-Your CPJ
