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The Advocate: Left, Right and Read All Over

The Advocate is pleased to welcome all new students to the Graduate Center (GC), and to wish another productive year to returning students. The GC is a unique and important place, and we hope that your experience here is a great one.

Our goals here at The Advocate are several. First, we strive to provide students with all the information they need in order to keep abreast of developments that affect them in New York City, especially at the GC and CUNY as a whole. We also aim to give student writers a place where they can freely publish their best writings and receive editing and payment—as well as publication on the web that makes your article available to anyone interested in your topic. Finally, and perhaps most important, we strive to make the paper and our website into places where a diverse group of students that may not have much face-to-face contact with each other can come together as a reading and writing public and thereby become a more organized and unified community. We publish anything— well, almost anything.

A strong community among students at the Graduate Center can help us in many ways. For instance, the GC student government is called the Doctoral Students Council (DSC). The Advocate is committed to keeping you informed about their activities so that you will know if there’s a meeting you’d want to make or a DSC-funded student organization that you’d like to be a part of. Too often students go through years of education at the GC without knowing, for instance, that the DSC sells cut-rate movie tickets at their offices in room 5495 or that the DSC can help you do something about problems you run into at the GC. Don’t like having a giant ad for the new“Hummer”—a military vehicle in which consumers fight their own “war on terror” on the highway—splashed across the front of the well-known progressive educational institution of which you are now a part? Contact the DSC (or The Advocate, for that matter) and join a group of students working to change that. The same goes for less visible but more substantive student concerns such as health care at the GC, the (currently nonexistent) fitness center and the use of technology fee monies. The Advocate agrees with the DSC that this will be an especially important year for student involvement and unity. For instance, under the knife of constant state-level budget cuts, the administration has announced that it will cut funding to the GC’s in-house nurse practitioner, and they will need your input as they go about finding a solution to this problem.

One of the simplest ways to get involved in the GC community is to write for us. Our editorial staff is unusually open to new ideas, and especially encourages work about the GC Community or your own intellectual work. We also welcome humor and political analysis, but will reject hateful attacks written by former swift boat captains. The standard pay rate for articles is $50, although higher or lower fees are sometimes arranged for certain pieces. In the past, some students have complained about a left-wing bias in our pages. But that’s not due to an authoritarian Stalinist editorial policy but to a lack of contributions from GC right-wingers. If you’re one of the more conservative students who looks at the world differently, we encourage and invite you to write for us.

Those of you curious about the paper or who are just looking to meet some people and have fun should definitely make The Advocate’s October party, to be held in our office on the fifth floor. Expect drinks, music, dancing, conspiracy theory, orgone panties, party favors and more. Like the Bush twins and OutKast, we too can “shake it like a Polaroid picture”.

Looking forward to a fun, politically engaged and intellectually productive year.