From the Editors
Those looking for information and rigorous and original writing focused on Chapman University, have been left wanting by the current offerings. Often, it is the weekly email from Dean Price that informs the student body of events on campus, and these events only receive further coverage if they fall into one or more fashionable categories in politics or popular culture, fall into that category of things which are fashionable to oppose, or if something goes terribly wrong. That is why we founded The Hesperian, and today we shall touch upon the topics that will be covered this week in our very first articles.
First, at the beginning of 2020 at Chapman, a moron said some stupid, racist things in a class, and this, according to the amateur priests of Our Most Woke Inquisition, happened because Chapman is Very Racist. This is silly, and embodies the Agency Detection Bias that one can only find among Twitter users, conspiracy theorists, and members of right-wing militias. It is an urge that says that all threats are orchestrated by someone or something that must be defeated for everything to be okay. And that fight against shadows demands that you participate, because it is “the right thing to do.” Arguing with these shadowboxers is often just a great way to waste time, but we do have one article from a former Black Student Union (BSU) member about her own experiences with intolerance at Chapman, and does much to reveal its diffused and complex nature.
On the topic of complexity, we have Chris Moore, who writes about the need to embrace complexity in policy, government, or otherwise, and how plans or systems that do not account for the mass variety of human experiences, and their decentralised interactions, are not just prone to failure, but dangerous. Oh, how wonderful it would be if inequality or corruption were actual systems or people that could be found and defeated, or simply legislated and protested into oblivion. All Americans, regardless of almost all ideological persuasions, have sought to be heroes in a just fight, yet we can simply point to the endless recurrence of these issues, and the recurring impotence of state-enacted solutions, to show that accusations against “structures,” whose existence is often based upon the accuser’s own political views, are but shadows of a nightmare.
Finally, The Hesperian’s cofounder, Ryan Marhoefer, has a column explaining our views and goals with this publication. We have been fortunate enough to have been provided with a local roadmap on how to not operate a newspaper, and we have taken those lessons to heart. Combined with confidence, curiosity, and supportive friends, we believe we are filling a vast hole in Chapman’s demand for a quality publication. We are more publishers than writers, and we will always be students, not pretend-journalists, and, ultimately, seek to deliver a publication that we enjoy reading.