Musings from the outgoing Editor-in-Chief

One learns many things as the editor of a college publication. In particular, one learns to assess threats to the paper’s ethos and tone. How does this need to be edited? What might derail publication? How can I make sure Duranswers gets written? Looking ahead to these threats is a big part of the job.

Though it sounds like a big job, the Salterrae is only a constituent element of a larger project: the culture of Trinity College. Trinity College culture, in turn, is a Federative element of University of Toronto culture, in stark contrast to the constituent elements at Innis, New, and University College.

But I – now down an editorial ‘we’ – digress. The extent of this comparison is that Trinity’s culture requires the careful exercise of editorial discretion to be kept on track, much like the Salterrae. We exercise this discretion through the Trinity College Board of Stewards, the Finance Committee, and the Trinity College Meeting. There we establish clubs, tear down proposals, raise levies, and slash budgets according to our College’s sense of self. Our ‘articles’ are our events, our clubs.

To push the metaphor to nearly unacceptable extremes: we are all associate editors of our College culture. If you doubt the seriousness of students where the expression of college culture is concerned, look no further than the furor surrounding Saints and Conversat, or the madness of Frosh Week TCMs.

While we generally maintain a sense of cultural cohesion, we sometimes fail in our editorial duties. Despite the hard work and best intentions of the above described and comically overwrought metaphorical editorial board, uncharacteristic articles are sometimes allowed into publication. One in particular is tainting our ethos. It is a cultural threat we failed to look forward to.

I am talking, of course, about the Trinity University Review.

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Subversion is the Review’s watchword. It seeks nothing less than the total replacement of our College’s dominant culture – one of a proud but nonetheless tasteful erudition and high mindedness grounded in the social sciences – with the tooth-gratingly blasé erudition and tasteful absent-mindedness of the humanities. This is clearly unacceptable.

What more, the Review’s tactics are in-your-face. Evidence of its reckless postmodern agenda is everywhere. The editorial board has, for example, entirely foregone the publication of proper journalistic profiles. Instead of having elderly, upstanding alumni relate memories of their time at Trinity College and their pathways to success, the Review publishes profiles of feelings.

To those quiet holdouts who opine, “a little poetry isn’t so bad,” I would point out that the Review’s menace is not merely rhetorical. It is scientific. The Harvard Business Review notes that poetry helps its ‘users’ develop a more acute sense of empathy. This is all fun and games. Until, of course, the College is entirely robbed of its inhumanity, perhaps in the blink of an eye. At that point, what are we left with? You could certainly kiss the campaigning, the petty infighting, the back-room deals –– practically every kind of entertainment –– goodbye.

If we are to protect Trinity’s cherished reputation as a den of avarice, collective steps must be taken to stop The Review. Some may characterize this call to action as ‘mean’ or perhaps ‘regressive’. They are correct, in an STA220H1 kind of way. Regression to the cultural mean is all we seek and is something of a tradition. We will not have tousle-haired outliers, with their Neruda recitations and their Fellini films, run roughshod over the neatly tied Sperrys of ordinary, hardworking Trinitrons.

Having carefully weighed the consequences of inaction, it is clear something substantive must be done to protect our College culture. Despite the personal costs it may entail and the decades of heartbreak it may spark, myself and like-minded writers at the Salterrae are left with no choice but to take the most drastic action possible to protect what we love.

I declare a literary feud.