Lessons from San Quentin

Thanks for the letter about the changes in the works for PAW.

One of your needed steps will be to junk this wording — “a magazine by alumni for alumni” — and to replace it with “a magazine by the University for the University.”

To pretend otherwise would strain the credulity of your readers.

After 66 years in journalism, as a newspaper reporter, editor, publisher, and owner in North Carolina, Miami, San Francisco, and Marin County, California, I’m familiar with who runs things and who doesn’t. For the past 13 years I first helped revive and now advise the San Quentin News (see PAW, March 22, 2017), one of the very few inmate-controlled newspapers in the United States. We’re proud of the fact that, although we circulate in all of California’s 35 prisons, the prison system does not pay for or run the paper. I would hate to see the alumni of Princeton University have less control over their publication than do the inmates of San Quentin State Prison.