Student center won’t solve for protectionism

I was bemused by yesterday’s article regarding the possibility of a campuswide student center (“University-wide student center considered,” Feb. 5). While a student center could certainly be a useful resource, the notion that residential colleges are unable to “accommodate” student demand for space is simply false. Rooms like the Saybrook Athenaeum, the Calhoun Parlor, the Berkeley Swiss Room and the ironically named Silliman Meeting Room cannot be booked for student meetings. As a consequence, they sit empty while the Yale College Council tells us that the problem is space. Residential college protectionism is the real source of the problem here; student groups have space enough, if only they were allowed to use it.

Jake Romanow

Feb. 5

The author is a junior in Silliman College.

Bring Buckley online

I trawled your website today in search of Yale Daily News editions dating from the period 1948 to 1950. I had hoped to read the columns of a young William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, who served as chairman of the paper during his time at Yale.

The historical archive that I found on the Yale University Library website could scarcely be called an archive at all: It included a modest collection of papers from periods it deemed “important,” but there were gaping lacunae throughout. Not a single paper from the Buckley era could be found.

This shoddy arrangement does a disservice to a paper like the Yale Daily News, which has a long tradition. Student journalists today could learn much from past figures as wide-ranging as Buckley on the right and Sargent Shriver on the left.

As a fellow Bulldog (although of a different variety) and newspaper editor, I felt obligated to bring this to your pages. YDN deserves a better archive, and you should press the library to get it.

Blake Seitz

Feb. 4

The author is a junior at the University of Georgia, where he is the opinions editor at the Red & Black student newspaper.