As you will probably recall, last year the Interfraternity Council voted to end chapters' submissions to the Greek Column in Newspeak. That action was, no doubt, prompted by an editorial which ran in the April 16, 1996 issue, which was prompted by a Greek Corner submission run a couple of weeks before that. The premise behind the first editorial was that the Greek Corner was not being used to its fullest potential, that it was being used more as a vehicle for inside jokes and sometimes offensive comments rather than a method of communication between fraternity and sorority members. Although it also expressed much gripe, the editorial's real purpose was to make others away of the quality (or lack thereof) of the Greek Corner submissions, and to try to motivate people to write better ones. To our dismay, the IFC and Panhel chose to withdraw the Greek submissions from Newspeak until further notice. This prompted a second editorial, on April 23, 1996, asking what went wrong. We had asked for improvement to the corner, and instead we stopped receiving them altogether.
And now it's back. The members of IFC missed the Greek Corner, so it was resurrected, but with the following restrictions: There should be a minimum of inside jokes, there can be nothing that says, "This isn't the view of my house, but...," and presidents of chapters are expected to read the submissions before they are sent. There are some obvious flaws with these new restrictions: What is a minimum of inside jokes? Presidents are expected, not required, to read the submissions? Yeah, that'll happen. Regardless, I was expecting better submissions. I thought that, after not having the Greek Corner for a while, houses might have wisened up a bit.
I was wrong. The first submission we received was absolutely horrendous - worse than any submission we've ever received. Another author stated, "I can't seem to remember why the Greek Corner was taken out of Newspeak anyway." Granted, as usual, not all submissions were bad. In fact, there were a few quite informative ones. To those houses, I thank them for respecting the space they are given.
Unfortunately, it is the case that a few bad submissions can ruin the corner for everybody. Of course, we cannot very easily take out the corners we want to keep out, and run the ones we like. If it's a case of "a few bad ones get in" or "none get in", I'd opt for the latter.
Read between the lines here, guys: if these submissions don't improve, they're gone. No questions asked. IFC took the initiative to remove the corners, with the intent that they'd be better if they were returned in the future. They were wrong. Now it's our turn. If these things don't improve, we will no longer run them. That's it.
Not only don't we like the quality of these columns, but they present some serious libel issues for Newspeak, and we don't want to be responsible for the crap that fraternities are saying through our publication. While it is not a member of Newspeak who has written the corner, it is Newspeak who distributes the corner to over 2000 readers. We will not be held accountable for the stuff you say. We'd love to have something like the Greek Corner, because we feel that Newspeak is a paper for the entire community. We want to be there for you guys. But you're making this quite difficult.
So, if you want the Greek Corner to stay, they had better improve. They definitely need to get better, and we're not joking. In fact, we are going to hold a meeting to decide if we even want to bother with the Greek Corner anymore. Next time, it might not be IFC, but Newspeak that votes to end chapters' submissions to the Greek Corner. They sucked, they were removed, they came back, they still suck. Why do we even bother?