|
BY ALAN ACOSTA
Just 45 minutes ago, I walked back to my office from lunch through White Plaza. The day felt like it had been cut from crystal everything sky and sun and red-tiled It is hard to imagine a prospective freshman coming to campus on a day like this and failing to fall immediately in love with the idea of being here. We who have the fortune to live and study and work in this place begin to take these days for granted, but all you have to do is entertain a visitor from Washington, D.C., or Minnesota in November to bring its special qualities back into focus. What is less visible is the part of Stanford that I've come to love with even more passion: the dynamism of ideas, the quest for excellence among students and faculty, the intellectual challenges created by diverse cultural and philosophical backgrounds meeting and at times clashing in the common pursuit of knowledge. When I arrived here three years ago to edit the part of the magazine you're reading now Stanford Today I looked at it as the dream job. The News Service had been called on to launch a section of the magazine that captured the life of the university, from teaching and research to student life and academic affairs. That 32-page section would reside in the middle of a newly revamped Stanford magazine. As an editor, the problem I faced was an enviable one: There was simply too much to write about. From the renowned faculty to research that makes the world a better place to live in, to students whose energy and intelligence make you long to be back in college again. Within a few months of getting to Stanford, I moved into my current job as director of the News Service, and a new editor, Cecilia Rodriguez, was required to take on that same embarrassment of riches. How do you capture a vivid, three-dimensional universe on the two-dimensional pages of a magazine? Our approach has been to cover stories that we believe matter to our readers and to let Stanford people tell their own stories from the most compelling classes seen through the eyes of professors and students, to the latest achievements in scientific research, from following five freshmen from the Class of 2000 through their first year on campus, to tackling some of the college life's most controversial issues rankings, funding and tenure. Helping people tell these stories in the pages of Stanford Today has been a richly satisfying project for all of us at the Stanford News Service. But the merger this summer of the Stanford Alumni Association and the university has made this "magazine-within-a-magazine" approach an idea whose time has passed. The two formerly distinct sections will be folded together to form a unified package. The responsibility for telling the stories you once read in Stanford Today now will fall largely upon the shoulders of the editors and writers at the Alumni Association. And while Stanford Today will cease to exist, those stories will still be in the magazine and will be in good hands. It's not often one can say this, but I have no qualms about saying it here: Those editors and writers will be blessed many times over by taking on the extra workload. And while the News Service will not be directly involved in producing the magazine, I'm hopeful that I'll never lose the feel of a journalist covering a great story for the first time that same exhilarating sense of novelty that washes over me every time I make the lunchtime odyssey through White Plaza on a beautiful fall day. ST
|
