Your voice is a currency — so use it thoughtfully

The opinion section can be considered to be somewhat of an oddball in The Chronicle. 

News breaks timely stories and in-depth features for on-campus and local/national issues. Sports does similar things, along with gamers and player reviews, for the grand gauntlet of Duke athletics. Recess releases a variety of entertaining commentary on arts and culture. Photo enshrines all these things in the form of a visual archive. 

Presumably, our job is then to amplify the opinions within the Duke community about things that are important to its members. Sounds straightforward enough. But what is an “opinion,” and what counts as things that are “important”?

Usually, the best reporters are those who can be as impartial as possible. This requires removing entirely one’s biases from an article, despite potentially living and breathing in the same spaces as that article’s subjects. However, the opinion section couldn’t be any more different. The best columnists are those who immerse themselves fully within their pieces, where their perspectives are so definitively subjective that no one else could have produced those words.

In my section, people don’t break stories. For better or for worse, people themselves — and their opinions — are the story. 

And what a year it has been to have an opinion on things. From the very first to the very last week of my time as opinion editor, new subjects emerged every day that caught the attention of our campus. Duke’s collaboration with Lululemon. College rankings from the Wall Street Journal. Greek life. Legislation affecting transgender athletes. Protests. Research cuts and the standing of higher education. Financial aid. The meaning of institutional neutrality and ideological diversity. Worker conditions. The visa revocations of international students and what they entail. 

On top of all this, it’s become harder and riskier to express opinions at all. 

Particularly in recent months, my tenure was dominated by a constant, unrelenting state of urgency, creating what felt like a swirling storm of uncertainty leaking into every corner of life. I had to wrestle with how the opinion section is meant to capture — or not — the nebulous concept of discourse on campus. 

Like how the value per unit of currency can be diluted if we print too much money, an overflowing amount of speech arguably dilutes the value of each unit of speech. Take the example of the nationwide “Hands Off!” protests in early April. Organizers stated that more than 1,000 rallies of different sizes took place and more than 500,000 people participated. Yet, as someone who consumes a lot of political news, I barely saw any discussion of this event on my timelines. 

The costs associated with organizing such an event were undoubtedly substantial — but for the public, it may have just one protest out of countless videos of others. Paradoxically, it seems like desensitization to both threats to speech and speech itself has risen in tandem with urgency.

A similar dynamic can be manifest for op-eds. In the context of campus life, reading an op-ed in the student newspaper may no longer be the primary way in which students engage with community discourse. (For better and for worse, the opinion section of The Chronicle will have to compete with apps like Fizz and Sidechat.) Now, it can be just another body of text out of a steady stream of other content.

Ultimately, this suggests that the traditional playbook of encouraging speech for the sake of speech, as fast and as much as possible, may no longer be good enough — at least in making tangible change.

Speech is, at its core, a medium of exchange between people. Somewhere along the way, I fear our systems have lost sight of that. The bombardment of information we receive every day, despite its timeliness, has not made the exchange in the marketplace of ideas more liquid. Instead, the media space is missing an injection of thoughtful forms of communication that provide constructive and authentic engagement. Op-eds have the potential to do just this: They can be long enough to articulate a rounded argument, accessible enough for wide audiences to understand, yet condensed enough to remain grounded in contemporary conditions. 

So, to any op-ed writers who feel the urge to say something fast — to just simply get their opinion out there as quickly as possible because you feel a sense of urgency breathing down your neck — I offer a reason to pause.

Your voice is a valuable currency. You have to use it intentionally for the investment to pay off. No one is asking for perfection, but I hope you choose your words wisely — purely for the goal of telling your story in the best and most compelling way that you can.

Alice Qin is a Trinity senior and served as opinion editor for The Chronicle’s 120th volume. She extends her greatest gratitude to her team of managing editors for putting up with her “weekly update” texts and When2Meet polls; to the writers she was paired with, whose wit and passion never ceases to amaze her; to Macey Davis, for being the best Monday Monday any opinion editor could possibly ask for; to anyone — whether it was staff writers or guest contributors — who took the time to publish a piece with The Chronicle’s opinion section during this volume. Your stories do not go unnoticed.

She would like to say how immensely proud she is to pass the baton to Shambhavi Sinha. There’s no doubt in her mind that Shambhavi will take the section to new heights.

She expresses an incredibly special thank you to John Bussian, a Duke alum who has served as The Chronicle’s pro bono counsel for over 30 years. No words can suitably describe how grateful she was for all the late calls and article reviews. His work, exclusively representing news media interests nationally in First Amendment matters, has deeply inspired her. 

Finally, she would like to congratulate Abby Spiller, Michael Austin, Zoe Kolenovsky, Ranjan Jindal, Zev van Zanten, Karen Xu and Morgan Chu for a truly special and award-winning volume.