Viewpoints & Editorial Independence

I became an editor of the Maroon’s Viewpoints section in spring of 2024. My co-head editor and I inherited a cozy office space, a hefty Google Drive folder, and a lot of angry emails.

Some background for the uninitiated: Viewpoints (VP) is unique among the Maroon’s ranks in that its writers opine rather than report. For instance, a news headline might say, “Dining Revamps Menu with Student Feedback on Nutritional Options,” while a VP headline might say, “No Amount of Kale Can Fix Bartlett.” In my entirely unbiased view, we’re the second most interesting section of the paper—trailing, of course, Crosswords.

Given its focus on protecting writers’ voices, VP has long been entitled to what I privately call the “let-’em-cook”  principle. This is formalized in article VII.3 of the Maroon’s constitution  as “partial editorial independence from the rest of the Maroon” for the express purpose of “publish[ing] content without fear of retribution from the Executive Board  on the basis of ideology.” Essentially, VP’s mission is to give you a platform to share your ideas. We help you snip, stretch, and cohere your thoughts, but your voice is ultimately your own, and we have an imperative to protect it—even if it proves unpopular with the paper’s staff. Accordingly, editorial independence stipulates that any external interference with the content of VP is limited to issues of “clarity, grammar, and ethical and legal standards,” largely implied to be a function of our invaluable copy team. From 2021–24, sensitive VP pieces also required DEI review, the scope and precedence of which was ill-defined; this body was quietly terminated in favor of an ethics board this spring. Beyond this deference regarding fact checking and style, VP has long “function[ed] independently from other sections of the paper and publish[ed] articles without the explicit approval of the editors-in-chief.”

Historically, it’s been these protections that allow the section to publish some of our most ambitious pieces. In 2019, a writer condemned a law school professor for making light of the n-word in a tempered but firm op-ed that drew grievances from the then-Editor in Chiefs (EIC). VP stood by its decision to publish. During the tenure immediately prior, the Executive Board elected to publish a photo of a young man apprehended on campus, framed in a way that several Maroon staffers deemed ethically unjustifiable. VP gave these editors a platform to offer reasoned criticism and launch a broader discussion of the ethical guidelines to which a campus newspaper is beholden. In fact, this sustained opposition was the principal reason for the photo’s eventual removal. VP’s ability to engage ideas that higher-ups on the Maroon may find ideologically inconvenient—particularly criticism of the paper itself—is key to our integrity and a perennial point of contention during my own tenure.

A Fiery Op-Ed and a Fraught Editorial Process

Last November, a VP columnist penned a criticism of Daniel Schmidt, a student and right-wing provocateur who had recently spun a Twitter tirade ascribing campus violence to the local Black population. “Is the modern American Dream just trying to live far away from Black people?” Schmidt wrote, terming the latter, “thugs whose IQs are far too low to understand how killing is wrong.” The response column condemned the obvious falsity of these claims and the racism that fuels them but also interrogated how a university community dedicated to free expression ought to respond to speech that doesn’t even attempt to seek truth. In his outlandish claims, the writer argued, Schmidt is stretching the limits of the Chicago Principles in the hopes that people will demand repercussions—call for his expulsion, rail against him, and put his name on people’s lips—at which point he can cry censorship and play the martyr who spoke truth to power. The piece specifically strives to puncture that narrative by casting Schmidt as a bratty kid, a nuisance; this is “the discursive equivalent of a child waving his hand in front of an adult’s face yelling, ‘I’m not touching you!’” the column explained. This framing is a core component of the argument the writer advances, down to the header, “Chicago Principles for the Unprincipled.”

Now, I knew the second this piece landed in my inbox that it might trip a couple censors . A week of edits and off to our DEI board it went, along with a direct message to our EICs for review on November 11. I received feedback from the former—implemented point by point—and a green light from the latter within a couple days and cheerily sent the piece up to production. I didn’t hear anything of it until the afternoon of production night, November 20, when the EICs indicated a handful of time-sensitive edits to be made before sending the piece to print later that evening. I winced, shelved my notes for a looming midterm, and pulled up the document.

After some back and forth, the author and I agreed with the majority of the nits, all of which objected to turns of phrase that erred on too inflammatory. But we kept coming back to the term “perennial pest,” used in reference to Schmidt. The EIC I spoke to argued it was dehumanizing. I argued that the word is, definitionally, “an annoying person or thing; a nuisance” and may just as easily be used to refer to a hyperactive younger sibling. I cited VP’s editorial independence and asked whether the edit was formally from a body like DEI or the copy section. The EIC informed me that “DEI flagged this,” to which I responded with a full transcript of the conversation in which DEI relayed its edits. The claim was amended to, “Well, DEI didn’t send a note about it, but they were concerned.” Funny.

Last-Minute Feedback Reflects Fundamental Misunderstandings and Delays Publication

I was stubborn, I confess. Sometimes my mom’s voice echoes in my head, reminding me it’s better to bend than to break—and said voice was just about dragging me by the ear that afternoon. But it was one interaction that made me dig in my heels: When we were considering replacements for “perennial pest,” the first thing this EIC volunteered was, “how about using ‘the most censored freshman on campus.’” The next referred to Schmidt as “among the most contrarian students on campus.” I sighed. I noted that the criticism was well taken, but they had to understand that Schmidt would wear those epithets like a badge of honor. The article aims to trivialize; Schmidt isn’t a big shot disruptor who has admin trembling in their boots but a pest and an embarrassment. That’s the entire point this writer is making, and while I can change their language, I refuse to take away from their argument.

The EIC who’d apparently reviewed this article a week ago and was picking over it now clearly hadn’t even internalized its central claim. This is no slight against this person’s intelligence or commitment—I know them to be a bright, warm, and dedicated individual who has done excellent things with their role. It’s just a function of our EICs’ bandwidth when they have tons of articles to manage and often rise through the ranks of News, which teaches editors to prioritize fundamentally different things. Former VP editor Cole Martin highlighted the same criticism during his award-winning 2019 tenure, cautioning against “arbitrary, last-minute feedback from EICs unversed in the nuances of op-ed production and unfamiliar with the needs of specific writers.” The one isolated instance I cite seems trivial, but in aggregate, these edits pile up, and they meaningfully blunt the voices VP intends to promote and protect.

Ultimately, the back-and-forth surrounding the Schmidt piece ended with the EICs refusing to publish what was apparently a “personal attack” and “ethics violation.” Recognizing the importance of timely publication, I assented, providing an edit for the objectionable line and noting that they were welcome to change what they liked as long as I could run it by the writer—who was waiting on standby—before publishing under their name. Instead, I was told that the piece had been pulled from the issue entirely and edits would be provided. This was November. The edits in question weren’t returned until February and were nearly entirely composed of the line tweaks I myself had supplied. By this point, Schmidt had deleted the offending tweet. The Maroon had effectively failed to offer its readership an interesting and nuanced critique and failed a writer. The piece is instead available on the writer’s personal blog.

Massive Stalls on Maroon-Critical Work Harm Our Integrity, Intentional or Otherwise

This is not the first time a writer has come to VP with a cutting and interesting piece, only for it to get stuck in bureaucratic limbo somewhere in the paper’s assembly line. Some of these stalls are internal to the section; I’ll be the first to admit I wasn’t a perfect editor, and I regret that. But the 2024–25 tenure was also operating with widespread understaffing and a massive backlog, owed to what is widely acknowledged to have been fraught management through 2023–24. One piece to come out of this backlog was a criticism of DEI initiatives, which had been pitched in summer of 2023 and submitted the following November. It was still pinballing between the former Head Editors and the Maroon’s own DEI board by the time my co-editor and I entered the scene in March.

An offshoot of this piece, which specifically critiqued the role and purview of the Maroon’s DEI board and the associated editorial process, was as a letter to the editor in late April. The author and I sat down for coffee to discuss their perspective and goals, emerging with a draft we were both pleased with by early May. But between a lengthy back and forth with DEI and review from Slate—the associated graphic, featuring a “Baby on Board” sign under a silhouette of a university graduate, seemed to cause offense—the piece didn’t see publication until July. I remember seeing the ping amid various work notifications, holed up in my shoebox of an NYC apartment, and thinking, “Well, that’s a damn shame.” I didn’t personally agree with the article in its entirety—in fact, I think our DEI board had some invaluable functions in terms of standardizing language—but I was keen to get it in front of an audience because it was well-reasoned and interesting. Yet it was July, and our readership naturally dips during summer as students scatter to the winds for internships and experiences. Intentionally or not, the Maroon’s hemming and hawing had functionally de-amplified the voice of one of its critics—a perspective that a paper committed to journalistic integrity should go out of its way to protect. Once again, we failed a writer.

Sweeping Moratoria on Content Are Plainly Antithetical to the Chicago Principles

So, we’ve seen VP’s interference-prone editorial process both misrepresent a columnist’s position and de-amplify another’s criticism, even when these contributors are from opposite ends of the political spectrum. But most egregious of all, I’d argue, were the moratoria on engaging with certain people and ideas. Early into my tenure, VP received a piece that made heavy reference to an article published by the Chicago Thinker, using its rebuttal as a springboard for a broader argument about the aestheticization of politics. The topic was non-polarizing but thought-provoking: Can we consciously model our value system on that of a once-great empire (e.g. Rome)? Editing it was a treat, on the heels of reading The Aeneid in sosc.

When I saw the telltale ping from Slate, I wasn’t surprised; the writer had thrown in a couple light barbs—maybe a three on the 1–10 scale from “Jim teasing Dwight” to “Kendrick decimating Drake”—and I was prepared to scrub out needless ad hominem. What I wasn’t expecting was the note that, as a matter of policy, the Maroon doesn’t acknowledge the Thinker and doesn’t engage with the content therein. It was alright that I didn’t know, really, but could I be a dear and get rid of any reference to it? I was baffled. What did that even mean? How could we pretend that a substantial and growing subset of the student body didn’t exist, especially given this political backdrop? It transpired that the staffs of the two publications had several personal disputes, marked by some Thinker staffers modeling unwillingness to engage in good-faith debate. While sympathetic to this, I reiterated that our columnist was willing to wade into these waters and that a blanket “ban” on a whole publication based on interactions with a couple individuals was premature.

Moreover, the entire concept flies in the face of open discourse. Like it or not, the Maroon’s contributors skew decidedly left of the political median, leaving the Thinker the most consolidated hub of politically right-wing discourse on campus. And the Maroon chose to model its every contributor as a mindless zealot who couldn’t possibly hold an opinion in good faith or be swayed otherwise. When faced with an increasingly prominent mode of thought in our country, we’re sticking our fingers in our ears: “I can’t hear youuuu.” I, a triple-threat minority in Donald Trump’s America, am not a patriot. But I’ve always believed we got something right in the First Amendment and the ethos that bloomed around it: when someone is loud and wrong, you don’t try and muzzle them; you cogently and carefully explain why they’re wrong. I picked a university that reflects those values. As a fresh editor, finally seeing the guts and gears of the publication I’d spent years contributing to, I was shocked to find that its premier newspaper doesn’t.

Lessons Learned & Looking Forward

The piece engaging with the Thinker ultimately published; our EICs and I had talked past each other for upwards of an hour when I finally lawyer-ed up and invoked editorial independence. It’s among the columns I’m most proud of from my tenure, not in the least because I’d done the illustration myself with an old tablet and a clumsy hand—we had no roster of artists in spring, and my co-editor was already churning out beautiful digital art at breakneck speed. But more crucially, the piece was strong because it met audiences where they were; an undecided third party could read the Thinker piece followed by this one and find themselves swayed. In fact, I was amused to learn that our columnist was introduced to the Thinker’s over dinner with a mutual friend, and the pair got on famously. You certainly can’t break bread with everyone, but a good VP piece is able to change some people’s minds, to nudge them into seeing the world from a different angle. If you’re just telling people who already agree with you exactly what they want to hear, you’re about as effectual as opening an umbrella indoors.

Many of the pieces that execute this “nudging” expertly are non-polarizing, from Eva McCord’s personal reflection on her bisexuality to Luke Conteras’s quippy policy argument over the computer science core. But several of our most essential pieces, from criticisms of the paper itself (journalistic ethics, our DEI board) to non-libelous but divisive arguments (racism at the law school, responses to provocateurs), are endangered by informal policies that are increasingly tolerant of clumsy edits and exclusions. Writers pour their time and energy into these pieces, and we do a disservice to both them and our readership if editorial independence continues to fall by the wayside.

Martin resigned from the paper amid this very tension, writing in a 2019 op-ed, “It’s understandable for EICs to want some control over op-eds published in the paper they manage. But if EICs have the unilateral power to reject op-eds they don’t like or edit controversial ones until they’re pointlessly banal, Viewpoints couldn’t publish many of the pieces it does.” As an exiting editor half a decade later, I echo this sentiment wholeheartedly. I’d call the incoming Slate to build on the excellent work from the past year while remaining mindful of how editorial decisions impact the Maroon’s integrity and call on incoming VP editors to be your writers’ fiercest advocates. I wish you the best in showcasing UChicago’s voices.

Cherie Fernandes is a fourth-year in the College and a former head Viewpoints editor.