Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeOpinionThe New U. Tackles the Issues

The New U. Tackles the Issues

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In case you missed the banners that are up all around campus, UC Irvine is celebrating its 40th birthday this year. Having some free time this summer, I browsed through some of the old, rustic New University archives in the office to see what UCI was like 40 years ago. The headline of the first New U. article immediately jumped out of the page.
‘Students are niggers. When you get that straight, our schools begin to make sense.’
In its early years, the New U. primarily published critical activist editorials that were typical of student papers at the time across the nation (The first story, by the way, talked about how students were getting screwed over by the public education system.)
By the 1980s, the New U. had turned itself into what you might consider a more typical newspaper, with a traditional journalistic format.
The New U. has changed a lot in the 38 years since our first issue was published on Oct. 20, 1968 with that headline printed on the front page. And yet, the New U. has remained unchanged.
In fact, some of the stories published back then are eerily similar to some that we publish today, albeit in a different context. Students in 1968, like students today, reported on the shortage of on-campus housing, the difficulty of finding parking spaces and in particular, complained about the UC Regents’ decision to increase tuition