Join the Editorial Board

Dedicated readers of The Chronicle may have noticed by now that along with the handful of alternating biweekly columns, random letters-to-the-editor and aleatory published community comments that make up the newspaper’s opinion section, there is one stalwart piece of writing that appears every day—a 520-580-word column penned by an author who goes by the odd name of “Editorial Board.”

What and who are we? The editorial board is a group of about fifteen students who debate, opine upon and write about a wealth of topics—including Duke’s incoming curriculum revisions, the response to Duke Executive Vice President Tallman Trask’s hit-and-run and conversations surrounding Antonin Scalia’s death—relevant (sometimes tangentially) to Duke students.

We come from different places, different cultures and different ideologies. On the board, you’ll find an advocate for socialism and a freshwater Friedman capitalist; a fourth-year M.D./Ph. D. student and an undeclared sophomore; a student from Harare, Zimbabwe and a native of North Carolina. Twice a week, we meet to debate upon salient topics. In each meeting, our voices mix and mingle as unique perspectives, coaxing out hidden insights that can only be revealed through multifaceted debate; as our debate wraps up into resolution, we seek to capture it in words publicizing trends, criticizing institutions and suggesting solutions in daily pieces. Our editorials seek to inform, persuade and change.

Today, we invite you to join us.

You might ask yourself, “Am I right for the board? Whom exactly are they looking for?” To answer your thoughts, we are looking to attract students who value clearheaded debate and transparent arguments; students who see flaws in their environment and believe that they ought to be a part of the effort to remedy them; students who are curious about the shrouded operations of the university they attend; students who are eager to learn, write and share; students who are just as happy to talk about the proper objectives of a liberal arts education as they are to tent in K-Ville for basketball tickets.

Most of all, we hope to attract students who seek to be voices of reason on campus—students who wish to elevate their voices above the fray and hubbub of Twitter and Yik Yak in order to deliver well-developed opinions to the denizens of Duke. The ideal candidate for the editorial board should respect the power of words and have a desire to use them in order to affect campus-wide change.

Students on the board will have an unrivaled opportunity to influence their peers, professors and administrators. They will learn how to craft strong arguments, analyze news trends and help to broadcast opinions to the thousands of daily readers of The Chronicle. They will find that editorial writing is not easy, but that it is rewarding and powerful. The time for citizens of Duke to leave their mark on the university is now.

We invite you to join the Editorial Board. Applications are due Wednesday, September 21. Email ajr74@duke.edu for more information.