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Editor’s Note is an upcoming weekly newsletter from WSN’s Editor-in-Chief that brings you the week’s top stories — and the stories behind the stories.
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Hi everyone!
As the end of the semester nears, I hope finals season is treating you alright, and as the year ends, I hope the holiday season has been bringing you some reprieve from the stresses of college life.
You might have noticed that this is a different type of newsletter than what WSN usually sends out. As the new editor-in-chief of WSN, I want to bring you more stories that matter to you, in ways that work for you.
Every Saturday next semester, Editor’s Note will offer a weekly recap of articles from the previous week, plus peeks behind the curtain at how we make stories happen. This week, I want to let you in on some of the plans that we’ll be kicking off next semester. But first — here are this week’s top stories.
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The Influentials Issue
From fat liberation to sex education, the last Under the Arch special issue of the semester profiles six members of the university community seeking to destigmatize the taboo. Read it now on our website or in PDF form.
SPS English Language Institute shuts down
The English Language Institute at the School of Professional Studies will be effectively eliminated at the end of this semester. Faculty say that the program, which served international students learning English as a second language, was deliberately undermined.
“They starved us of students and they starved us of resources,” one professor said. “I really think that students and teachers need to be allies against the admin because, seriously, they really hate both of us pretty much equally at this point,” said another. One former employee described an atmosphere of “completely overt intimidation and bullying.” Alexandra Chan digs deep into the shuttering of the English Language Institute.
Michael Steinhardt: namesake, trustee, plunderer
If you’re reading this newsletter, the name Steinhardt is probably familiar to you. Hedge fund billionaire Michael Steinhardt and his wife Judy named an NYU college with a $10 million donation in 2001. In 2019 he was accused of sexual harassment by six women, and he sits on NYU’s board as a non-voting Life Trustee. He also had a “rapacious appetite for plundered artifacts.” On Monday, Steinhardt was ordered to surrender $70 million in stolen antiquities. He agreed to return the artifacts to avoid criminal charges.
Since the news broke, student governments representing the NYU school named after Steinhardt have called for the school to be renamed, the NYU board of trustees has said they will be “looking into the matter,” and faculty in the Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communications penned a letter to the editor calling for renaming and vowing to remove the school's name from their email signatures, websites and other public profiles.
Other top stories
This week’s house editorial: NYU’s recently reported policy of meeting the full demonstrated financial need of students in the class of 2025 should be extended to all current students.
The overhyped “House of Gucci” (dir. Ridley Scott, starring Adam Driver and Lady Gaga) falls flat, Isabella Armus writes. “It’s rare to witness a film that seems so disinterested in itself.”
A few seasonal flashbacks
This November, Candace Patrick reviewed the new Mariah Carey Christmas song in Listen to This — it’s not just “All I Want for Christmas Is You” anymore. Four years ago, WSN’s 2017 staff also weighed in on original Christmas songs, and in 2013 Erica Gonzales explored the hype for Ariana Grande’s first Christmas album.
If you’re looking for a new favorite cozy seasonal beverage, Jules Roscoe recommended spots to get hot chocolate around campus last month.
Remember when Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen went to NYU? Me neither — I was busy learning how to read and write at the time — but it was a big deal back in 2004 when Jason Rowe wrote about the millionaire twins’ role in perpetuating unethical labor conditions in light of both the religious and gift-giving aspects of the Christmas season.
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You can, of course, read these and all our other great articles at nyunews.com. Now for some previews of what’s coming next semester:
We’re looking forward to bringing you more new weekly newsletters. If you liked catching up on developments in world news with the news desk’s Soapbox, ranting or raving about Joey Hung and Sabrina Choudhary’s Ranked series, or expanding your music taste with Listen to This from our music staff, you’ll be able to get those takes delivered straight to your inbox.
We’ll start by sending you the first couple installments of each newsletter, but don’t worry — you’ll be able to customize your subscriptions. We don’t want you to miss out on our great writing, but we also don’t want to spam you with content you’re not interested in.
We’re also working on some exciting changes to our web infrastructure, some of which will be visible to you and some of which will be more on the back end, which should improve your experience on our website.
Keep an eye out for improvements like cleaner article pages, an updated homepage layout and higher-resolution images. By the way, if you think you can help, hit us up! We're looking to fill some new web design positions.
You can learn more about joining WSN here, and you can fill out this form to get in contact with us.
Finally — you might think that I’m the most important person at this paper, but it’s really you, the reader. If there’s anything else that you’d like to see from this newsletter or WSN as a whole, or just have any questions, please reach out to me directly at the email down below. You can also find me on Twitter at @teythemtheirs.
That’s all I have for you today — the next Editor’s Note won’t be until January, but by then we’ll hopefully be able to show you some of what we’ve been working on. Until then,
—the editor
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