Dear readers,
A new school year is upon us, with much change to be expected in the 2010-2011 term: a new Provost for Undergraduate Education, a new Undergraduate Senate, a new U.S. Congress, a new freshman class, and, of course, a new volume of the Stanford Review.
Since its founding in 1987, the Stanford Review has been an evolving institution – and with good reason. The challenges faced by Stanford students have changed significantly, and the* Review* has positioned itself to fit those needs – as a defender of substantive curricula in the late 80s or of student free speech rights in the mid 90s or of intellectual diversity in the 2000s. But no matter the issue of the day, the Review has been an important source of reporting and commentary for a campus desperate for quality sources of both.
Today, the mission of the Review is unchanged, but its means have been altered to adapt to the current landscape. On a campus where long-form journalism is on the decline (for proof, think of the Special Fees rebuke of the Progressive or the shrinking reporting staff of the venerable Daily), the Review has reasserted itself as a reporting force on a campus desperate for such content. Stories on financial malfeasance emerging from the ASSU and Stanford Daily have reminded campus of the need for an assertive and independent press. And as a biweekly, the *Review *will avoid covering the daily inanities and instead commit itself to providing deep, informative coverage of campus’s most important issues – all with a skeptical eye toward unquestioned ideology.
Alongside its growing campus news coverage, the Review will print an opinion section dedicated to alternative perspectives that can be found in no other publication on campus. If you’re looking for sex-capades, political poetry, or ungrounded polemics, then we suggest you turn elsewhere. Here at the Review, you’ll instead find intelligent and substantive stances that represent some of the only skeptical opinions out there. While I can’t promise that you’ll agree with everything we say, you can expect to hear diverse, questioning voices duking it out on our pages.
While the Review places much importance in its status as the campus’s only conservative publication, we place greater importance still in being intellectually honest and promoting substantive discourse and debate. Just ask our writers and editors, who represent nearly the entire political spectrum and all share a distaste of Stanford’s unquestioned liberalism.
In this issue, our writers have taken on a whole host of topics of importance to conservatives and Stanford students in general. Articles on the “green dorm” and Caltrain budget troubles reveal much of what this volume will be about – taking on Stanford-centric issues and applying a critical or investigative gaze to get to the heart of a story. Our opinion section gives further insight into what’s to come; the editorial and columns preview a volume of the Review that will by no means shy away from criticism of the University administration or where the conservative movement may have gone astray (despite our paper’s identity).
I hope that this volume’s content will inspire and provoke. If you’ve got something to say, please feel free to comment or contribute (email me at alexkatz@stanford.edu).
Thanks,
Alex