Every member of the editorial board has spent a different amount of time on staff. Regardless, we have noticed one thing: an increasingly involved student body. We’d like to take this final editorial to say thank you.
Each student’s involvement — from guest columnists to daily readers — has improved the paper, and Baylor, tremendously.
Students have offered insight into a variety of issues over the past year and because of their decisions to spark debate, we have seen the number of informed students increase.
We have run numerous letters to the editor that directly challenge either this board’s collective opinion or that of columnists. The letters were civil and well-informed.
A conversation on the opinion page fosters much growth in our community and offers a holistic view of a topic. Even with five people sitting on this editorial board, important points of view are completely overlooked — an error not corrected until the student body steps up.
In that same vein, entirely wrong information that unfortunately slips into our editorials is not accepted as mere truth by the student body. Our peers correct us when we are in the wrong. That needs to remain true.
This editorial board is not the final say on any matter. In fact, our goal is to be the start of discussion on campus — not just within the paper but around campus, too.
Students have not only been helpful in offering their insights on page 2 — they have also provided interesting interviews for our news articles, which in turn has increased the value of our content.
Our job as a newspaper is to understand the pulse of the student body: what bothers them, what stirs passion in their lives, how recent changes to the university affect them.
While we certainly aren’t the only organization looking to inform Baylor students, we take seriously our jobs to provide accurate news coverage that is both pertinent and valuable.
As students, it is very easy for us to remain in a collegiate sphere — never peering outside to get a grasp on the world, state and even city happenings. At the Lariat, we seek to be an easy first step to the bustling world.
We are thankful for a student body that understands the power of the press and realizes the important pillar information is in our ever-advancing world.
“Freedom of the press is not an end in itself but a means to the end of [achieving] a free society,” Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said. The individual members of the Lariat staff are not the reason students are more involved and more informed.
That is the result of a fully functioning form of democracy on our campus.
Regardless who is writing the news articles or columns, as long as ethical journalism is the core and students are keeping this paper accountable, the Lariat will be a successful resource for students.
Thank you, students, for making that a truth this year.
