There are times at Yale when it seems as if, for every action, there's an opposite (if not necessarily equal) reaction.
Is Yale making progress on diversity? This fall, more African American freshmen enrolled in the college than at any other Ivy League school. But meanwhile, Yale came in 38th out of 50 on Black Enterprise magazine's list of the best colleges for African Americans -- an especially stinging slap because Columbia, Harvard, and Stanford ranked in the top ten.
How about the status of women? In August, Yale's provost became the first woman to be appointed president of MIT. In October, two women at Yale, one a graduate student and the other on the faculty, won MacArthur Fellowships. But in September, a male freshman counselor pleaded no contest to charges of sexually assaulting a female freshman back in 2002.
What about science? New engineering and chemistry buildings are rising on Prospect Hill, and, to pick just the most sci-fi of the latest breakthroughs, an applied-physics team recently coupled a photon to an artificial atom. But the percentage of undergraduates majoring in the physical sciences still hovers around 8 percent.
Yale has every reason to contradict itself. It is large, it contains multitudes. This makes it a fascinating place to run a magazine. Unlike newspapers, magazines don't seek to record every significant piece of news; we aren't obligated by the daily churning of events. Instead, it's our privileged task to choose the most interesting and important gems from the passing stream of cultural consciousness, clear off the mud and extraneous ideological matter, and present them to our readers in the best setting we can offer.
The best setting differs for different subjects. A student-cultivated organic garden at harvest season cries out for a photograph. A new second-in-command of the university demands a straightforward news piece. When the People's Republic of China asks Yale's president to give a master class on university administration, that requires space, intelligence, and depth -- a feature story by our executive editor, in short.
We choose features sometimes for sheer fun. A hundred and ten years ago, the Yale and Harvard football teams met in Massachusetts for a game that became known as the Springfield Massacre. We couldn't resist. A feature may also be a serious matter of public service, like our July/August investigation of sexual harassment and abuse policies ("Lux, Veritas, and Sexual Trespass" by Emily Bazelon '93, '00JD). Or it may be a case of work so significant and a career so interesting that we can't help but bring in an eloquent writer and a gifted photographer for a major profile.
The process of choosing can be enjoyable in itself. (A photo of Ralph Nader's press conference at Skull and Bones? Or of Norman Mailer at Timothy Dwight College? We chose Mailer.) But most of the time, the choices require more thought. We try to convey, over time, a sense of flow and currents: a news story on international student visas in March/April, a short clip in this issue, and, in the future, a longer news review. We get it wrong sometimes, and later wonder why we omitted this news item or gave so much space to that feature. But because we cover such a complex, evolving, and intriguingly contradictory place, there is almost always a chance to go back for another look. 