By Paul Esau (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: August 26, 2011
Print Edition: August 25, 2011
My name is Paul Esau and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper you hold in your hands. It’s my job to officially welcome you to this special first issue of the school year, and thank you for being curious enough to grab this paper and open it up. An inquisitive mind is a necessity for a university student, along with bad hygiene, a world-weary attitude, and a blatant disregard for the consequences of sleep deprivation. For those of you who are returning to UFV, welcome back! For those of you who are new, welcome to the good life!
The Cascade, as a newspaper, has been a proud part of the UFV student experience since 1993 (before some of you were born). My predecessors tell me that it was originally run by a Soviet-style collective intent on converting the student body into loyal comrades, but the truth of this is unverifiable. What I do know is that the “collective” were a wild and crazy bunch capable of changing the name of the paper week to week, and printing fully nude photos on the front cover.
Obviously, as The Cascade has aged, it has also mellowed and matured. Go back and have a look at the front cover of this issue, do you see any nudity? No? Well I didn’t either…
At first.
There is a lot happening on that front cover, so it’s easy to miss. Do you see Charmander, that beloved Pokémon from your childhood? How about that strange bloke planking on a picnic table? And what’s that in the background? Is that a prominent member of UFV’s administration? Naked as the day he was born?
Well maybe The Cascade hasn’t lost all its crazy after all!
The thing that I personally find most exciting about university newspapers and The Cascade specifically is that, unlike “traditional” newspapers, we can publish pretty much whatever the heck we want. Just like a university freshman in his first semester, we here at The Cascade are free to reach beyond the boundaries of convention, to try, to fail, and perhaps even to succeed. So what if you took Play-writing, Mennonite Studies, and Japanese 101 this fall, despite being in the Engineering program? So what if I hired the famed astrologer Sumas Sibyl to predict every detail of your future? All of us are here to temper our understanding, to broaden our horizons, and to gather crazy stories to someday tell our children (so they won’t think we were always “boring”).
Those of us who will live to have children that is. Sibyl has informed me that you personally are going to die in a tragic golf cart crash in November, so don’t bother with that deposit for next semester. She also suggests you leave everything to The Cascade, good karma and all that.
It’s not actually a bad idea. You are a student, and The Cascade is a student newspaper, written, administrated, and funded by students. All the names in the masthead to the right of these words are those of students – people you may find sitting beside you in class, or humming loudly in the library as you try to study. Although your name might not be on that list, you also (as a student) have a definite say in the direction and content of this paper. See something you like within these pages? Write us about it. See something you don’t like? Absolutely write us about it! Have an idea for an article, column, or opinion piece? Come visit us in Building C and we’ll do our best to turn your idea into a reality.
Have fun reading the rest of the paper. As Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Just think of The Cascade as tinder for that fire, fuel for the spark within us all.
See you next issue,
Paul Esau
