Birthdays have always seemed a little strange to me. There’s very little you have to do other than a) survive and b) show up to earn a celebration every year, and The Peak is no different. We’ve finally hit the big ‘five-oh,’ and much like the university that we cover, we’re anything but shy about celebrating it — even if the paper didn’t really do much other than stick around for a half-century.
Don’t get me wrong. I love this paper with every fibre of my body, and I think that we deserve to pat ourselves on the back every once in awhile. But with the space I’ve been given in this issue, I want to do something other than rehash the platitudes reserved for anniversary celebrations and retrospectives. Instead, I want to pay homage to the people who’ve made The Peak what it is and what it has been over the past 50 years, good and bad.
These are the students who spent their evenings and weekends editing copy and laying out pages, who stalked SFSS board members and university administrators around campus to get the perfect quote, who slept on lumpy couches next to day-old pizza boxes and knocked back beers while toiling over keyboards and typewriters.
Our archive, whose shadow looms large even today over our cramped meeting spaces, is a living testament to the thousands upon thousands of hours that students have poured into these pages. Not all of it is good, but not all of it is trash, either. Like any other student newspaper, The Peak is hit or miss. But when it hits, it really hits.
Still, celebrating 50 years in publication shouldn’t mean that it’s time to bury the paper, or to consign its glory days to a dusty history book. Even today, our offices are full of clever, talented students working 12-hour days to put this paper together for the students, staff, and faculty of this school, because it’s what they love to do. I can relate. Three years into my time here, I can tell you that the feeling of looking at a fresh stack of papers Monday morning never really loses its lustre.
Our little paper may be pushing middle age, but we’re still young at heart.
Whenever new writers or incoming editors come to me asking for advice, I always tell them the same thing: don’t worry, because all of us here are just making it up as we go along. Halfway through my tenure as Editor-In-Chief of The Peak, I’ve never been more sure of this. But I’ve also never been prouder to offer students a place to learn and to practice their craft, to make mistakes and to celebrate successes, to both learn more about their community and become far too cynical to ever look at it the same way.
In 1965, when the student body at SFU was roughly the size of your first-year psychology lecture, this paper gave students an opportunity to both be heard and to make others heard. Fifty years from now, when our satellite campuses double and our tuition fees quintuple, I hope that we are still a symbol of the power and potential of the remarkable students at this school.
At its heart, The Peak is here to give you a voice. So speak up.
