‘Formalize the Obvious’

I followed the conversation about PAW’s future in the September with keen interest.

If I read the fine print correctly, currently PAW staff members are employed by the University. One-third of the magazine’s budget comes from a University “subsidy,” not counting unspecified revenue from ads the University purchases in very issue. The University discourages PAW from seeking donations and the magazine’s board complies.

I’m sure conditions are even worse at other institutions, but if this isn’t the very definition of effective control, I don’t know what is. I vote that we formalize the obvious.

Classes can buy space to announce their births, marriages, retirements and deaths, but the University (in the form of its current managers), not the alumni, should be the ones to pay for the privilege of advancing contemporary ideological agendas under the Princeton banner.

University-subsidized PAW has rarely seen a monstrous consensus it didn’t enthusiastically rush to help normalize, whether it’s the past nearly 20 years of unhinged, immoral, and illegal overseas military interventions or the cause du jour, using pseudo-science, genuine medical quackery and criminally negligent statistical projections to justify painful and pointless social and economic dislocations which are now in their 549th day in the U.S. at the time of this writing.