CCSC v. ESC--The War Wages On

On October 23, 1890, the Columbia Spectator ran the most insanely ridiculous article ever.

"With this issue Barnard College makes her bow--we beg the young ladies' pardon, her courtesy [curtsy]--to our readers. It is, for the present at least, our intention to make the news of our sister school a regular--and of course a pretty--department of our paper.

In if the course of time, however, we find that our sister students, prepossessing and spirituelle though they be, are not interesting and alert, we shall indeed feel obliged to sacrifice their publicity to more pressing news!

We shall, therefore, anxiously await from our correspondent the account of something 'real naughty and shocking' to keep alive interest. We should not like to suggest a love affair with a tutor; but if such an event came to pass spontaneously in the course of time, nothing could be further from our profession of impartiality than to restrain the news of it."

We have--I hope, at least--come a long way since then. That said, for time immemorial, one of the things that Spectator has been called out is that our coverage creates [or, more charitably, reflects] a hierarchy among the four undergraduate schools.

Knowing the prevalence of this concern, one of my goals coming into this position was equalizing our coverage across the four schools, and especially their councils and elections.

The problem, though, is what do you do when every school has a different system? CCSC is most open. Not only do their candidates usually leak that they're planning to run well in advance of the start of elections, they also have the longest campaign season, the greatest number of candidates, and the largest number of voters.

Compare that, for example, to the ESC. I lived on the same floor as president-elect Liz Strauss last year and we have a relatively good relationship, but she wouldn't even confirm off-the-record that she was running for president until the actual registration came (and even then, she was asleep and unavailable for comment. I never even knew that Eash--who also lived on the floor--was considering a run. The ESC announces their E-Board candidates on a Monday... and vote on Tuesday. There are no accusations of SGB bribes because there are no endorsements to buy off, no public debates to cover, and definitely no death threats because it's all done internally.

Barnard, in the same vein, disqualifies candidates who announce their candidacies before the date. And as far as GS goes, it's hard to get too much debate moving among a sub-1,200 student body among whom many are part time, the vast majority life off-campus, and who as a general rule don't care about their political representatives.

I'll leave that question open and invite you all to compare our CCSC and ESC coverage over the last two weeks in regards to parity for yourselves. But I did want to bring up a point that Owen, last year's campus editor, made last year when he got flak about the difference in article placements regarding CCSC and ESC election results--judging based solely on size or placement is an inherently flawed measure.

For some reason, I can't find a PDF of today's front page, but if you look at it, you'll see an enormous photo beneath a four-column headline. On the other hand, last week's story on Strauss being named president, while also in the upper-right hand corner, is only 1.5 columns wide with a smaller column below the article.

But look at the photos! We had a photographer sitting in the Satow Room for five hours waiting for a decent shot of Strauss and none ever presented itself. They didn't go out partying or drinking afterwards, and were generally unphotogenic. The best we could do is get this canned shot. Also, looking at the PDF, you can see Dani Zalcman's gorgeous shots from the alternative spring break in New Orleans.

On the other hand, this might be the best shot that we've had on our front page this semester. Also, the CCSC elected three class boards, three at large reps, and two Senators on top of the E-board, and the elections, in which about 1,500 people voted, were contested by some 56 odd candidates. For the ESC, a few dozen people voted on fewer than ten candidates for just five positions.

I'm not sure that I made any solid points here or led to any conclusions--personally, I'm not sure where the right balance lies, though I think we've done better this year than we did last year when Dan Okin's election was stuck at the bottom let of the page--but I simply wanted to say that these are complicated and difficult decisions.