NOTES FROM THE DESK

Author: Ben Salkowe

"They should really spruce this place up," a friend recently noted when I showed them our Campus office. "You work in here?" another had asked earlier. And then there is the general look of disappointment when our first-year writers visit and are asked to sit on the stained dorm furniture that we have been given, and to keep their feet out of the murky stream of water that runs across the floor. The Campus office, now in the basement of Hepburn, is quite possibly the saddest piece of real estate the College has to offer.

Isolated as we are in a subterranean office, the College community is effectively prevented from interacting with our staff, and our facilities are a complete embarrassment to show any prospective student, parent or guest. It would be nice if going through McCullough, prospective students could look in, say, The Crest Room-a vacant but great space that could house The Campus - and see the glamorous space where our newspaper is produced.

But there is something more important than the mold growing in our closet. The small size and shortage of work stations in our office forces us to compete for computers, often working until dawn on Tuesday nights, and it cuts off an opportunity for editors and writers to work together and foster those "intense learning interactions" that the administration has expressed an interest in supporting. Our office is not even big enough for our full staff to sit around a table at meetings, much less for writers and editors to work collaboratively as they do at many of the premier college newspapers - where writers receive a full peer tutorial in journalism and editors workshop with guests to continually improve the paper.

Each spring when SGA presidential candidates come seeking our endorsement, they add a new Campus office to their list of promises, but they always seem to forget us when they win and move into their cozy SGA office suite. Administrators have acknowledged it would be nice to have a decent Campus office, but nothing seems to change. Would someone please rescue us from the bowels of Hepburn?

-BEN SALKOWE

NEWS EDITOR