We do what we can for dear old Penn

Imagine, if you will, that an Internal Revenue Service employee sat down at the kitchen table with your parents while they filled out their taxes. Your parents, of course, are upstanding citizens who never, ever claim golf clubs as business expenses. But if there were an IRS agent at every kitchen table in America, some citizens not quite as upright as your parents might well decide to interpret the tax code a bit more strictly. Now imagine that the IRS agents are actually journalists; your parents have transmogrified into a University administration; and instead of filling out tax forms once a year, million-dollar decisions are being made every day. The metaphor has its clever ironies. Journalists are about as popular as IRS agents. The Penn administration really does want to be your parents. And the University of Pennsylvania -- much to the chagrin of city administrators -- doesn't pay taxes. And, like all good metaphors, it has its own embedded truth, gift-wrapped for you in the next paragraph. People do things in private that they would never do in public. When they are doing those things with your money, it is often wise to make sure they are always in public. And that is why we have newspapers. I am not, for the record, speaking of Woodward-and-Bernstein-style investigations of government corruption. People, even University administrators, are rarely corrupt on a grand scale. But they are, on occasion, lazy, arrogant or merely hasty in their actions. And the job of the campus newspaper is to make sure they aren't hasty, lazy or arrogant while playing with our money. Our existence is a permanent Miranda warning: Anything you say can and will be printed. Anything you do can and will be reported . And so, please do your best to say and do those things that are best for this University. It seems like a simple concept. And yet, sometime last year, I lost the ability to count the number of times a University administrator had asked me why the DP doesn't respect, love or care about dear old Penn. I simply ran out of fingers. So here, for the record, is the answer. The people who work at the DP care enough about this campus -- its present and its future -- to spend dozens of hours every week putting out this paper. We care enough to spend nights and weekends on a windowless floor in a somewhat run-down building on the campus periphery. And we need you. We need you because we are you. We are undergraduate students in all four schools, and we come from cities and towns across the nation and around the world. We are athletes and mathletes, double majors and pre-meds, fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, and members of pretty much every organization on campus. So take the time to tell us about all of the things that don't work as well as they might, all of the parts of Penn that you love enough to want to make better. And take the time to join our staff to help keep the campus informed and entertained. Keeping people honest is important, but we are also the glue that holds the Penn community together. We are Penn's institutional memory and conscience, a voice for change and a forum for exchanging ideas. We are 34th Street, filled with things to do and reasons to laugh, and dailypennsylvanian.com, bringing you information and access 24 hours a day. We are where you turn to celebrate Penn's triumphs in bold color and where you come to mourn communal sorrows with remembrances of things past. We are your newspaper. Thank you for making us a part of your lives

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