Duplicity or Fairness: A response to The Hoot 

A few weeks ago, The Brandeis Hoot published an open letter expressing the importance of having multiple journalistic voices on campus and their concern for a perceived lack of emphasis on this value by the University. I, and many others, think it is important to be able to have many different perspectives when it comes to campus news and news in general. However, the letter reads more like complaining about funding from the Student Union and with the University’s administration rather than a call for multiple journalistic voices on campus.

The editorial accuses the Student Union of deliberately targeting The Hoot for budget cuts. To me this seems like a ridiculous and self-centered argument. For one thing, since I started my time here in 2023, Brandeis has had budget anxiety. It is not just student clubs that are getting slashed, it’s most everything at the University, from professors being laid off to whole departments in constant states of anxiety of whether they will exist in a year’s time — everyone is worried about their budget. Furthermore, The Hoot’s budget wasn’t unjustly cut — a source close to the matter reported that last year, they were allocated around $20,000 and only used $11,000. I think it is justified to say that we can allocate less money to a club that has only used a little over half their budget. This principle applies to all clubs, not just The Hoot. When a club is allocated more money than they use, their budget will be decreased to reflect that. While an explanation would be a courtesy, to me it seems obvious why there would be a decrease in the budget. It’s not personal, but a matter of numbers. 

As previously stated, I think it is amazing that we are able to have two student-led journalistic publications on campus, and I fully support the chartering of The Hoot as a club. The Hoot and The Justice do not serve the same purpose, and even if they did, there is a difference between having, for example, two knitting clubs, and having two different papers. Given The Hoot’s switch to a magazine format, there is sufficient difference between The Hoot and The Justice to warrant each other's existence. In my opinion, this would be a welcome change, as well. It allows readers to truly distinguish between the two publications, which further strengthens the argument that they are not competing publications but rather two publications that have separate goals. The Justice typically focuses more on news about the campus, with (obviously) an opinion section, and The Hoot is more focused on opinions while having some campus news. 

Ultimately, it is good for the campus to have both voices; however, I would be remiss not to mention the fact that there is, from a reader’s perspective, a seeming lack of attention on the editing side of The Hoot’s publication. I think we can give some of the formatting inconsistencies some slack as it is the publication's first year as a magazine. However, there have been many textual errors presented in The Hoot that made it to publishing in nearly all of their publications this year.

I understand that it is an unfair expectation that everything in The Hoot or any student publication should be perfect — we are students, we have other things going on in our lives, assignments due, relationships to maintain, etc. — but there should also be some standards when it comes to typos and misinformation. A few months ago, a Hoot article was published that consistently misspelled George Eliot’s name. If this were a one-time error within the article, I would understand, but George Eliot is not an obscure author; her name should not be misspelled in an article if the piece was properly edited. This too goes for capitalization and other similar grammatical things, such as in the most recent issue inconsistently capitalizing Winter Olympics in their piece about it.  As expressed, I think it would be unfair to expect every single issue of a student newspaper to be perfect, however, I think the Hoot should consider adopting a corrections section like the Justice has to acknowledge these errors. 

While it may sound like I have a personal vendetta against the Hoot and am being nitpicky, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I say all this because I truly believe that having two publications on a campus is a fantastic thing and fully support the chartering of the Hoot as a club. 

-Graham Glovka ’27