To our readers:
Last week, The Muhlenberg Weekly received an unsolicited letter in the mail appearing to be from the Ku Klux Klan. College newspapers across the country, from several City University of New York schools to the The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Post, have received identical letters to ours.
While we could have ignored the letter altogether, I felt it was important to address it in some public manner – especially given the recent events on our campus and the rise of white nationalism in our country. And so, I want to take this opportunity to explain why this letter was so worrying.
In the second part of the letter, the author suggested that we should look into a recent piece of “harmful literature” that he claims was written solely to “agitate the college educated who always think they have a better answer for the woes of the world.” He encourages us – and by extension you, our readers – to express our disapproval of this book to Google and the author.
We take our role as a journalistic ‘watchdog’ very seriously. It is our responsibility to filter out manipulative and harmful information so that you can be assured that what you read in our newspaper is of value.
There are many individuals and groups attempting to determine what constitutes ‘news,’ and while we wholeheartedly encourage story pitches, this was very different. This letter served as another reminder to us of the importance of serving the best interests of the Muhlenberg community – and not those of an extremist hate group nefariously attempting to push their agenda on us. I hope that any other college newspaper that received this letter would join us in that sentiment.
I would like to reiterate our Op/Ed and Letter to the Editor policies: We encourage submissions from anyone in the campus community wishing to weigh in on any topic of interest to Muhlenberg, timely or otherwise. As both our Editorial Board and Op/Ed columns have addressed several times, we support the right for a variety of perspectives to be heard – especially on a campus like ours that is decidedly liberal-leaning. That said, The Weekly does not permit the publication of hate speech in submissions or within the comment section of articles on our website.
We never have and we never will.
Gregory Kantor
Editor-in-Chief
