Whether it is voting or football rivalry, club activities or Honor Code issues, political cartoons or parking, The Daily Universe opinion page prints student concerns and interests and has been doing so for decades.

“Logically, a student newspaper belongs to the student body,” states an editorial article in the Oct. 17, 1956 edition of The Daily Universe. “This means that each student at Brigham Young University has an interest in the Daily Universe, not only a critical interest, but a personal interest.”

Nathan Moulton, current Daily Universe opinion page editor, said the goal of the opinion page is to get people thinking about issues.

“A lot of times people don’t agree with what’s on there and that’s good because it gets them thinking and talking about the issues and that’s the most important thing — not whether they agree or not,” Moulton said.

The letters to the editor, which Moulton describes as the “highlight of the opinion page for most people,” are letters written by Daily Universe readers that give feedback and discuss student concerns. Moulton said the Universe usually receives 40 to 50 letters every week.

Besides the letters to the editor, the opinion page also has a house editorial, written by a member of the editorial board; a Viewpoint, an opinion usually written by a reporter, expert or professor; and the Scripture of the Day.

“I would encourage everyone to read the other stuff on the opinion page besides just the letters to the editor,” Moulton said.

Daryl Gibson, who has worked full-time at The Daily Universe for 26 years and has been affiliated with it since 1976, said he doesn’t think student concerns have changed much over the years.

“It’s important for us as a newspaper to provide that source for our readers to talk back,” he said. “It’s what keeps us on the straight and narrow. When we try and quash that and cut people’s right to talk back, we’re doing ourselves a disservice as well as our readers.”

Gibson said reoccurring issues, such as the Honor Code, come up because of the nature of BYU.

“The things that BYU is about — keeping your honor and using that honor to gain an education — and demands of mixing a religious tradition and your spiritual point of view with an educational tradition and an educational point of view, are always going to be in some sort of conflict,” he said. “BYU is about inherently bringing those things together and that tends to provoke a lot of discussion on the opinion page — and should.”

Ralph Barney, who worked as a communications professor at BYU from 1972 to 1996, said The Daily Universe is less lively than it was when he was editor-in-chief in the ‘50s.

“There’s a greater emphasis now just on training journalists — or whatever they’re going to be — rather than on serving the students,” he said.

Barney said he thinks because The Daily Universe is overseen by faculty, the editorial page “cannot do much that is going to afflict the comfortable at BYU.”

“My whole notion is that there is not the life in the opinion columns that there was back then,” he said. “Now, having said that, we used to run some pretty stupid stuff and immature kinds of stuff … but I thought that at least there was more life.”

Barney said the paper had two kinds of goals: to inform the student body of what was happening on their campus and to offer topics that prompted discussion and thinking.

“One of our measures was how many letters to the editor we would get,” he said. “We wanted to stimulate letters to the editor, so we irritated people.”

Barney said the staff would write editorials about the arrogance of returned missionaries, which brought outraged letters from returned missionaries.

He said another editorial he wrote stated that Korean War veterans didn’t need more benefits.

“That was kind of an arrogant thing on my part, but that got the boxing coach, who came into my office and was going to beat me up,” he said. “That got a lot letters to the editor both ways.”



Copyright Brigham Young University 15 Nov 2005