The Emerald has been a part of my life for the past four years.
It’s dominated my time at the University and probably taught me more than any of my classes. And it was through this newspaper that I was privileged to view the major events on campus during the past four years through a journalist’s perspective.
The first big news story I covered happened during my freshman year when the University made national headlines in May 1997 by adopting new language in its sex policy within the Student Conduct Code. The local and national media swarmed around the story, and some incorrectly reported that the new policy required that University students had to sign a contract before they had sex. In reality, the new policy required that before people engage in sexual activity they must obtain “explicit consent,” defined as a “voluntary, non-coerced and clear communication indicating a willingness to engage in a particular act.”
The news of the sex policy carried over to my sophomore year, when an Honors College student was one of the last people to be punished under the old sex policy. In October 1997, Donta Graham-Preston, then an Honors College senior, was found in violation of the Student Conduct Code on the basis of two allegations of unwanted sexual assault. He was expelled from the University for two years and forced to withdraw from the Honors College, and that led to a campus and community-wide debate about the severity of the punishment.
Tear gas and broken glass grabbed the headlines during my junior year when it became apparent that Halloween riots had become an annual occurrence. On Halloween 1998, most of our staff was together at a Halloween party, anticipating a repeat riot from the year before. And when the riot broke out, our troops dispersed to cover the story, some still in their Halloween costumes. Most notably, we had Batman covering the lead story — tights and all. In the end, 12 rioters were arrested, four of whom were University students, and $8,000 worth of property was damaged.
But no other story impacted the campus as much during the past four years as the University joining the Worker Rights Consortium. In April, Nike CEO and University alum Phil Knight announced that he would halt all personal donations, including a promised $30 million to help renovate Autzen Stadium, because the University joined the WRC, a labor monitoring group. And the campus became totally divided.
People blamed the students who protested in front of Johnson Hall for 10 days in an attempt to persuade University President Dave Frohnmayer to sign onto the WRC; they blamed Frohnmayer for not telling Knight in advance about the University’s WRC membership; and they blamed Knight for being selfish.
We received hundreds of letters to the editor and posted feedback on our Web site from furious people who threatened to never donate to the University or hire any University graduates. During the first 24 hours of the story, our Web site received almost 76,000 page views, which is three times more than our previous highest three-day-old record of 26,000.
I was lucky enough to be a part of all of these news stories, sometimes on the front lines reporting the stories and other times in the background editing them. It was an amazing, exciting and at times extremely frustrating way to spend my college career.
Years from now I won’t necessarily remember everything I learned in all of my classes, but I will remember my first news story for the Emerald and all the news that happened during the four years that followed. It was at this paper that I got to experience all the major events at the University, which is a great place to be a college journalist.
Laura Cadiz is the Emerald’s editor in chief. She can be reached via e-mail at [email protected]