To those who say the letters page isn’t important,
To be called a ‘man of letters’ was a badge of respect, a mark of erudition. Now since I’m writing this article, and not you, I’m going to anthropomorphize our paper and say that equally to be a ‘paper of letters’ is the mark of a truly worthwhile enterprise. It’s the interaction between reader and medium that distinguishes the newspaper in its popular form from the more esoteric journals, and a student paper that is by its very nature created to serve a specific population should be accountable to them in this manner. We elect our Editor for the paper, so it makes sense there should also be a simple point of contact for students to express their views? Not only that, but with participation in Union politics and an all-time ebb, an anonymous e-mail to the paper is probably a much more realistic way to get an opinion voiced easily by a member of the student population not already involved with Union politics, for everybody knows our Union is an essentially oligarchical system.
It’s not just for serious matters that we need our letters page; I’ve written (and had published) numerous nonsense letters during my time as a student here as well as more thought-out ones, and remember distinctly how much more approachable the Union Executive became after their beard-related exchange though those very pages at the beginning of the year.
One might say that articles should address these concerns, and I concede they often will, but from a reader’s point of view, the brevity and style of a letter renders it more easily digestible than an article.
We talk a lot of ‘participation’, and the letters page in a student paper is the simplest and best form of participation that the majority of students have real recourse to.
