Student-Initiated Change

Throughout this year, we at the Weather Vane have called for greater student involvement in campus activities. Tyler Grove implored people to join Peace Fellowship. We called for the Opinion Board to be moved to Common Grounds. We also took great pains to publicize the Green Design class and accompanying campus sustainability movement.

And we’ve seen change, despite our constant critiquing and examining every fault that we can find here on the EMU campus. We feel that the campus deserves praise for efforts that are truly above the norm. The students who have become involved with clubs and organizations have not only kept student life running on campus; we feel that what vibrancy does exist on campus is a result of these students being dedicated to their niche in the student life. Employees in Common Grounds have pressured the managers to explore greener options for their coffee cups, and better options are to be implemented next fall. Peace Fellowship has grown into a large, vocal organization on campus, and the Opinion Board, now located outside Common Grounds, if not vibrant, has considerably more dialogue on it than it has in the past two years.

All of these changes have taken place in the same way. Several dedicated individuals have decided that they would do a task and have continued, even after realizing the immense amount of effort required to accomplish their goal in a respectable way. These individuals have garnered support, eventually spreading the work around until it’s manageable for all involved.

The Weather Vane is no exception. When we began our roles as co-editors, we were concerned at the level of student involvement, but we were personally blessed as people put their time and energy into our particular interest, the student newspaper. We, as co-editors, would never have been able to create a valuable student mouthpiece without being able to depend on our incredible staff, who deserve as much or more credit than we do for the finished product. These include: our copy editors, Kaitlin Heatwole and Chelsea Mast, who’ve proofread and edited every word in every Weather Vane so far; our page editors, Tyler Grove, Pete Nelson, and Jessica Newman, who’ve picked up the slack on their pages whenever needed and worked long into many Wednesday nights with us, Katie Rodriguez, our photo editor, who has edited most of the photos that make it to print; our regular contributors, Sara Beachy, Sunil Dick, James Hall, Rebekah Slack, Benaiah Wade, Jason Godshall, and Rhoda Shirk who’ve consistently filled our pages with quality articles and photos; and for those who have contributed occasional articles for us as we’ve asked for them, your articles have been among our most brilliant. Thank you so much…

Good Luck,
Mark Fenton and Dylan Zehr

(And the marathon ends…)