Issue 9 – The Quindecim, The Independent Student Newspaper of Goucher College

 

It’s hard to believe, but The Quindecim published it’s second issue of the semester last Friday. As a whole, we didn’t do well with deadlines, which made for a rough week with little sleep. I’m taking it as a reminder that we’ve all got full schedules and lots of other parts of life to balance, so we can’t let missed deadlines take over our week.

That being said, it’s weeks like last where it’s easy to feel severely under appreciated by this College for the work that we do. Administrators and trustees are always quick to remind us of what an accomplishment this transformation has been and what a boon The Quindecim has become for the school.

Yet there’s nothing there for us.

News is always happening. It doesn’t stop over Mid-Semester break, Winter break, Spring break, or Summer vacation. Being an editor on The Quindecim simply requires significantly longer hours than just about any other position held by students. It is a round-the-clock, round-the-semester, round-the-year responsibility. It’s not just one meeting per week, or one event per semester.

Every two weeks, editors spend entire nights producing the newspaper so that it meets our deadline. On top of academics, athletics, and the trials of the college experience, editors pull consecutive all-nighters cooped up in a room above the Gopher Hole to ensure Goucher gets its newspaper on time.

Working on the newspaper is a grind, one that our editors endure on a biweekly basis.

For that work, we are unpaid and receive no academic credit. What’s more, at the end of this semester, our reward for publishing 14 comprehensive, lengthy issues of the newspaper this year will be a significant pile of debt.

Here’s the truth: Until another group of editors as enthusiastic, motivated, and crazy as we are comes along, which I doubt will be soon, The Quindecim will never be this good again. Until an infrastructure to fund this newspaper – not as a student club as we’re currently considered, but as a necessary and vital institution on this campus – is created, it’ll regress to what it was before: dead in the water.

I could go on and on, but this is The Q‘s next big moment. We’re making moves to see that change happens.