Editors' Note

Dear Reader,

Like President Brodhead, our time at Duke is coming to an end. But although we’ve only been here for four years compared to Brodhead’s 13, we’ve nevertheless had some time to get to know this place. As journalists, we’ve also spent a lot of time examining the campus from as many angles as we could think of, trying to understand the many, many elements that make Duke what it is.

Duke is a fascinating place. Not everything that we have found is encouraging, and sometimes we haven’t been able to fully wrap our heads around the occasionally byzantine nature of this place. But we could spend a lifetime exploring it, and every person we talk to here teaches us something new.

We’ve particularly enjoyed our time working on Towerview precisely because longform journalism gives us a chance to spend more time and space exploring than we could otherwise. We have been able to spend hours talking to people in order to spend hours writing thousands of words about them. We have been able to put together long lists of questions, take the time to follow up on them and in the process generate a new list twice as long. It has been our responsibility—and our pleasure—to do this most months for the past year.

We hope that at least some of this enthusiasm has rubbed off on you. Towerview would not be possible without your interest in the long-winded products our wild goose chases produce. Hopefully we’ve been able to keep you informed, entertained, and engaged over the past year as we have covered everything from politics to sports to Stephen Miller (the Duke alum and White House policy advisor is, after all, a phenomenon unto himself).

Towerview would also not be possible without a number of people who don’t get enough credit for what they do. The Chronicle’s masthead, including Editor-in-Chief Claire Ballentine and Towerview Photo Editor Carolyn Chang, have helped us out of a lot of tight spots as print deadlines have closed in. And in addition to everything else he’s done for The Chronicle, Sports Editor Amrith Ramkumar has taken the time to look at what we’re producing and let us know when we’ve gone off the rails. Finally, we would be remiss if we did not thank the Chronicle business office, which is staffed by wonderful people who have enough trust in us and our process to trust their livelihoods to a self-selecting group of college students who want to try their hands at journalism.

We hope that you will continue to read—and to engage—with longform Chronicle journalism in the coming years.

And as always, thanks for reading.