The Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2013 steps down this weekend.
We, the Yale Daily News Managing Board of 2013, are on our way out. We will elect our successors this weekend, and next week’s papers will be theirs.
Our lives will change drastically. The newspaper to which we have dedicated the last year will no longer define our days. But for you, our readers, this weekend is not a landmark at all. You will read the same newspaper once we are gone; our year at the Oldest College Daily will be just another in its 134 years of history.
The News will continue to cover the stories of the moment, from the presidential search and Yale-NUS College to the Connecticut Senate race. But the issues that defined our tenure will gradually fade into history.
Just as our board leaves the News this weekend, all Yale students will eventually leave the University and the world they built during their years here. New students will take their places, new buildings will rise and the school they know will slip away. Somehow, this changed and somewhat foreign place will still be Yale.
In the past year, our board has sought to chronicle the Yale of our time and to tell the stories we encountered around us. We grappled with questions concerning the sexual climate on campus. We weighed globalization and liberal arts ideals. We questioned the well-worn path from Yale to investment banks as Occupy New Haven camped across from Old Campus.
In time, these and other questions we asked will become relics. We are ephemera here; Yale will persist long after us. But it is thanks to each student, in our repeated, slightly varied, but distinctly singular iterations across generations, that the University remains vibrant and ever questioning.
Yale is a school with a long history, but it is propelled by each added day. Energy and movement are essential here. Every office-hours discussion, every walk to G-Heav and every violin solo is a key part of the spirit of the school. So the task falls to each of us: Know that you are only a part of a series of students and years, but hold each story as your own.
Even when the Yale you knew has long since faded, when the stories we covered this year reside only in the archives, you and your classmates will own the memories of the campus you inhabited. And we can dare to presume that those memories are greater than us, that our puny tales matter to the eternal Yale. That is why Yale can pulse, ever new, along with its students.
After this weekend, our board will no longer be telling your stories. Instead, we will live the stories that define this community with you. Eventually, all of our stories will stray from New Haven, and others, equally vivid and equally new, will take their place.
So long, all, and keep the stories coming.