I received the news of UNC-Chapel Hill moving all classes online due to an abundance of clusters of cases through a notification from The News & Observer. The headline read “COVID-19 cases at UNC are ‘cluster@#$%,’ student newspaper says in scathing editorial.” I immediately felt proud and thrilled, as a writer at NC State, to see the transparency and courage The Daily Tar Heel (DTH) editorial board had to run such an honest editorial.

Attending college during a pandemic is a hard path to navigate to say the least. We received new restrictions and returned to in-person classes with masks. Many students also moved back on campus only to take online courses now or move out. Along with the fear of the coronavirus, this semester has proven to be something we never could have imagined.

Like Technician, the DTH is an independent school newspaper that has the freedom to express its personal opinions. In this case, the editorial expressed its frustration with the school’s administration’s failure to notify students of the official number of COVID-19 cases, as well as its attempt to bring students back to campus despite the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which “placed the University’s housing plan in the ‘highest-risk’ category.”

Still, it can be daunting to publish an editorial that directly addresses the faults of the administration of the university you are currently attending. But, I think it is important to communicate our concerns with how things are being handled and the decisions that affect us all as students. 

At least for myself, I know it is often easier to stray away from divisive subjects in student journalism and in real-life conversations. The DTH’s response to everything made me not only proud to be a student journalist, but it also showed how important student journalism is right now. DTH is a prime example of how student journalism can have a substantial impact on the public through difficult times, and too many people write off journalism as a useless career. 

The fact that so many people hate on journalism and students pursuing it as a profession because “journalism is a dying field” and is losing cultural relevance has angered me for years. Students can and are looking to their school newspapers to seek support in the emotions they are dealing with, especially now.

A friend of mine that goes to UNC-CH told me that DTH put everyone’s thoughts into one article in reference to the very editorial I am talking about. 

The editorial even got national attention, with articles from The Washington Post, CNN, Buzzfeed and many other news outlets. I also saw a CNN interview with the DTH’s opinion editor Paige Masten, and despite the content of the discussion, it is so exciting that a student newspaper was acknowledged in such a large way for a good cause.

Although NC State and UNC-Chapel Hill have been longtime rivals—we even have the famous satire “The Daily Tar Hell”—it is important to put our differences aside as we are all dealing with the same problems amid this pandemic. We are all college students who want the best semester possible considering the circumstances, and we want to be treated fairly by our universities.

Ultimately, I wanted to commend the DTH for their success with publishing a strong, influential article that gained the recognition it deserved. It is crucial—especially as colleges across the country, including NC State, are experiencing the same disastrous case clusters and campus closures—for students and student journalists to voice their opinions on matters that affect their lives and education.