It's probably cliché to say I struggled writing this editorial. Regardless of whether it is cliché to say so, it remains true.

So it is that just because something is redundant, it doesn’t make it any less correct.

Writing—much though I'm told I can make it look easy—remains hard, even for me. Despite it coming naturally to me I still struggle with it pretty well constantly. Sometimes I struggle to write well. Sometimes I struggle to write at all.

During my first few months as co-editor I took to—upon my experiencing a bout of writer's block—reading whatever was close to hand. Sometimes this was something online. I read the entire back catalogue of my favourite essayists’ Medium. I read every article my friend linked in his monthly newsletter. I read everything even vaguely interesting which came into our inbox.

When I ran out of these, I read Arthur.

58 Volumes dating back to the mid-60s gives a girl a lot of reading material. I've read Arthurs from the year before I started and from years before I was born. However, even in those pages dated well before I was drawing conscious breath, there’s something remarkably familiar.

I’m not saying this just because the paper bears the same name and was written by people espousing more or less the same Leftist politics as myself (fun fact: Arthur was run by Maoists in the 80s!). Even accounting for several decades of shifting in the Overton window, the things they were writing about back then are more or less the same as today.

Now, I must admit, upon first reading this I did find this somewhat distressing. Even at an institution as infamously slow-to-the-punch as we are, one nonetheless wants their writing to be topical. It’s hardly fair, then, to call our articles “news” if they superficially resemble something written in 1973! 

…is it?

Arthur has existed in some form or another for almost as long as Trent University itself. Yet even as far back as the 70s, student journalists were lambasting rising tuition, bemoaning the apathy of the student union, and generally giving administration instructions (in as many words) of where exactly to stick it.

There’s this brilliant Letters to the Editors page of an Issue of Volume 41, which shows a man in Edwardian dress fuming at his typewriter exclaiming (paraphrased) “Shut up Arthur you stupid gay commies! Always complaining about tuition and administration and the TCSA! Not everything has to be political!”

Time truly is a flat circle, eh?

Honestly, coming off the events of last volume (with which some of you might already be familiar) it somewhat relieved me to see that animosity between Arthur and certain institutions neoliberal in their tendencies is par for this particular course. Reading innumerable writer's past detail indiscretions of previous TCSA Boards of Directors (and reading said Board members’ incensed replies) left me feeling just a little bit vindicated. 

Is it depressing that in Trent’s almost-sixty-year history the general trend has skewed towards a corporate malaise that sees students paying more for worse education at a university which sees them as a line on a balance sheet? A little, yeah. However, it would be more disappointing had there not been writers year after year to speak truth to fucking power in the pages of this rag.

Sure, these stories might have been told literally a hundred times, but someone’s got to tell them. So long as Arthur continues to exist, we’ll never run out of dead horses to beat!

It’s a thankless job, and it sure doesn’t pay well but—as the adage goes—I guess someone has to do it. It looks like one of those three someones you’re stuck with is me, at least for the next year. Glad for you, or sorry it happened, I guess.