To Our Invaluable and Dearest Readers –
I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving! I have good news for you all – I’m delighted to say that the Binghamton Review is once again controversial! With protesters organized by far-leftists besieging the Pipe Dream office and Democrats making irrelevant outbursts during debates, we finally have some campus related stuff to write about and for people to hate us for!
We spent most of the past school year covering national and international political issues. This wasn’t totally our fault, there just wasn’t that much political stuff going on around campus. Fortunately, this past month at least, that has all changed!
The biggest change by far to come to the Review recently, is the development of a bona fide website. Whereas before all we had was a page where you could see the PDF’s of our past issues, we now have a website where we upload a new article at least every other day, and where you can leave online comments. This is good, since despite my best efforts, nobody writes letters to the editor anymore (aside from letters of praise – no really, there’s one in this issue). A good number of the comments are decidedly negative, but since I’m a libertarian, I’ve decided to not filter or moderate comments at all. Feel free to let loose! The URL is www.binghamtonreview.com, in case you haven’t noticed it yet on the back cover or on the bottom of every other page. I’d like to thank Jordan Raitses in particular for putting the site together and managing it with skill.
Now, to briefly discuss the main event – that being the protest in front of Pipe Dream’s office over an article entitled “Dressing as Another Race Isn’t Always Offensive.” In my initial reaction to the protest, and Pipe Dream’s subsequent reaction, I put up an article on the website entitled “Pipe Dream’s Groveling and Pathetic Apology Misses the Mark.” It was an articulate and eye-catching headline, but in retrospect, the language might have been a bit harsh.
We at the Review still hold the view that Pipe Dream’s three apologies were excessive, but we’re also coming at it from fundamentally different angles. Whereas at first I thought that Pipe Dream was caving to public pressure, what I later realized is that Pipe Dream’s editors actually thought that the protesters were right in their grievance at PD’s lack of racial diversity. I also said that PD’s editors were self-described liberals, but I’ve been told that they actually aren’t (or not all of them are), so I’ll retract that claim as well.
In reacting to this controversy, however, the Review is doing exactly, at its very best form, what it is supposed to be doing. That is, we are providing an alternative voice. Our mission statement, which goes back over 20 years, has the following sentence in it: “We seek to promote the free exchange of ideas and offer an alternative viewpoint not normally found on our predominately liberal campus.” In providing an alternative perspective on this campus controversy, we’ve enhanced the campus discourse.
Last year, we did a great job of providing an alternative viewpoint on national political issues. There will be no other publication on campus that exposes Obamacare for the disaster that it is. You won’t see other publications talking about the five million people who’ve lost their health insurance because of this disastrous law. If you want to read about how evil Republicans are, any other publication will do. If you want to learn about how capitalism and free markets actually help the poor much more than socialism ever can, then you need to pick up the Review.
I’m immensely proud of my staff, our contributors, and the Review as an institution for the great work we’ve been doing. This will be the last issue that we come out with this semester, but if you ever feel like getting enlightened or amused during the upcoming Winter break, please feel free to check out our website, and perhaps even leave a comment! You won’t be the only one. So far, according to our stats, we’ve gotten visitors from (aside from America, obviously): France, the UK, Canada, India, Germany, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg(!!), Sweden, and Japan. Not a bad start!
Best of luck on your finals! If you have the intelligence and sophistication to appreciate the Review, I’m sure you’ll do great!
Dan Milyavsky