Consortium fosters cross-campus political dialogue

When he was the editor-in-chief of the Penn Political Review, 2010 Wharton graduate Bob Ma had been searching for a cheaper printer for the magazine. This seemingly routine search gave way to what is now a nationwide organization.

Ma founded the Alliance of Collegiate Editors last spring, a nonpartisan consortium of various political publications at schools across the country, including Harvard, Columbia, Duke and Stanford universities.

After contacting the editors of the political magazines at Harvard and Columbia for advice on cheaper printers, Ma got the idea for ACE.

Ma “found that they were really helpful,” and after approaching them with the idea, he realized that they would be interested in “forming some sort of consortium and extending the relationship we had before.”

“It was just a community of different publications [that] all had common interests and decided to work together,” Ma added.

One of the main things that ACE does is give each of the publications access to a myriad of different political viewpoints across the country, said Mark Hay, the editor-in-chief of the Columbia Political Review.

Being in contact with other publications can really “open you up to a lot of concepts and challenging debates … that you don’t have access to on your own campus,” Hay said.

Since college campuses sometimes tend to be politically homogenous, “we do get limited in our own cultures sometimes, and reaching out across campuses can … combat our political stagnation,” Hay said.

After starting with four member publications, ACE has since expanded to 14. It has also recently started partnerships with Politico, HuffPost College and USA Today College.

In addition to publishing articles from various writers from the different publications, ACE conducts joint interviews with various political figures, including an upcoming interview with economist and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon Jeffrey Sachs.

The joint interviews “allow us access to people we would not have gotten on our own,” Penn Political Review Editor in Chief and College junior Ned Shell explained.

“It has facilitated more high-level dialogue and helped PPR compare its editing structure and funding sources to [its] peers, leading to improvement from a managerial and editorial perspective,” Shell added.

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