Michael Sholars
Editor-in-Chief
@sholarsenal
What is it about our school that seems to attract so much attention and trouble?
Don’t get me wrong.Trouble keeps Excalibur in business, but I wish that I could have brought you more good news over the past year. How many times can you be compelled to pick up our paper when the headline is yet another update on student politics (groan), yet another assault (sigh), or the slow advancement of yet another strike?
It turns out, you can do it at least 30 times, and I’m so thankful for that.
Listen, I know you have better things to do at any given moment. And even if you only pick up Excalibur for Sudoku and our (goddamn excellent) comics section, it counts. Because you reached out for us, literally, and gave us a portion of your time. The new Angry Birds game just came out, yet you have put enough faith in me and
my team to let us into your lives on a weekly basis.
I hope your collective faith has been rewarded.
When I started this year, I didn’t want to coast on the 46-year history of the paper. Just because we’ve survived for generations doesn’t mean that a first-year student needs to give a damn about us. I wanted to offer you all a newspaper with personality, that covered the things that mattered to all of you.
Because our campus, despite its flaws, has personality. And York students have a vibe all their own.
Think about it. We’re cut off from Toronto proper. Our campus doesn’t happily intersect with Bloor, like U of T’s does. Nor is it spitting distance from the Eaton Centre, like Ryerson. We’re a tiny city, and we’re all in this together. It makes us different. We fight to hold on to campus treasures like Blueberry Hill, the Orange Snail, and Michaelangelo’s because we don’t have the option of walking a few blocks over to the clubbing district. We’re terrified of strikes because a non-trivial amount of us have already been through one in our time here.
On the other hand, something is very wrong with our little city. I don’t care what statistics are brought up to argue that the York campus is just as safe as any other city; the problems are coming from the area immediately surrounding our campus, one of the most infamous high-crime areas in the country. The further you live in the Village, the more palpable a risk you take by walking home at night. This problem is compounded several times over if you happen to be female, because this past year has seen a string of attacks against women that defy rational explanation.
There are hundreds of ways to combat all of these problems, and I have seen some amazing things in my time here. Students organizing food drives for a class project. Wildly successful protest movements thrown together in days through Facebook. A worldwide activist phenomenon that was launched because of an article in this very paper. In many ways, we’re alone up here, but that just means that we all carry a bigger responsibility to improve our collective life. After all, we’re all we have.
As editor-in-chief, I did my best to contribute to the overall dialogue of the campus in a meaningful way. A unique student populace deserves a unique student paper. I injected as much of myself into the pages as I could without making the entire organization into my vanity project. If you’ve ever enjoyed the jokes and pop culture references on the front page, that was probably me. If I have put together a product that you’ll continue to read in the future (and there are big changes coming next year; be excited!), I did my job. If you ever learned something new from these pages, I did my job.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some trophies to polish.
