By Ryan Broderick, Editor-in-Chief
If you've noticed the bloated, full color Chronicle sitting open in front of you right now it's because we've decided to be a bit decadent in celebrating our 75th anniversary.
We decided that this issue wouldn't be one full of typos and factual errors, with dynamic color images and interesting content. We vowed that every spread would pop and pull in readers because it's our birthday, damnit, and we'll design if we want to.
Now that being said, we're still a college paper made by underpaid, overworked, journalists-in-training so if you notice anything untidy in this week's 32 page issue forgive us.
But with 75 years of Chronicle writers behind us it's hard not to feel a little dreamy about the legacy that implies. There isn't a lot of legacy at Hofstra, at least the non-self-deprecating kind. But if you haven't heard, we're the oldest organization on campus. Surprising, right?
As we met with the Hofstra Alumni House to organize our looming reunion, we started to get a very vague idea of the type of history the Chronicle's been through.
Unlike an organization like WRHU, we don't have a very strong alumni organization, which is to say, we don't have one. Editor-In-Chief's pass down a make-shift oral history the same way children talk about a haunted swingset on the playground. You never get the full picture.
But to celebrate the milestone, all year we started going through our archives, or the ones we have. We discovered many are missing. We were told the archives stopped being bounded when the guy who did them died.
Let's ignore the irony of a newspaper, called The Chronicle, not being able to even chronicle its own past.
In sitting with the few interesting alums from the last couple decades, something else appeared, almost better than a tightly written, well-recited history.
The Chronicle, it seems, is and has always been a patchwork mythology of introverted writers, screaming fights over commas, warring editorial egos, and the overwhelming melancholy of the disappointment only student journalists could understand.
The months counted down to April and slowly alumni would pop in to the office to see what the old girl looked like. They'd come in looking for a familiar landmark, they'd comment on the new computers, joke about where they used to hide their alcohol. Not that we have hiding places, of course.
But that's just kind of the mood about it. That attitude for authority you get when you're put in charge of watching what authority does. In the college realm it makes you act a bit childish, but there's a funny, bitter unity to it.
It's also something the Alumni House had a tough time combatting when they started trying to pull support for our reunion. How do you get people who's jobs were to know the worst parts of Hofstra to want to come back?
Good question.