Thoughts on freshman columnists

The belief that freshmen should not write opinion columns is apparently widespread. It lurks in the comments section of The Daily Princetonian’s website, as Sarah Sakha noted in her column “Just keep scrolling.” On Yik Yak, I have seen the same post soar past 100 up-votes, so it cannot be written off as a fringe belief of angry Internet denizens. Reading the paper, I have even found myself agreeing: We freshmen suck at this.

Sakha dedicated a brief paragraph to defending the freshman voice, but I want to justify it thoroughly. First, writing is the cure to our inexperience. My own first column demanded extensive revisions from an associate editor, and after that revision process, my writing was a little stronger. Hopefully, I have continued to improve with every article. Yet growth is slow. Newcomers to any field —be it singing, dancing, juggling or opining — start without really knowing what to do. If you judge them by their first few attempts, they’ll seem terrible. Their first few failures are necessary, however, for them to learn and improve. I suspect that my writing quality would have been no better if I had joined the ‘Prince’ as a sophomore, so writing as a freshman will allow me to produce better quality work for the next three years. In fact, I wager that if everyone joined as a sophomore, our website would be home to comments that claim, “Sophomores shouldn’t write opinion pieces.” Whatever our age, our writing will be a little below par when we’re newbies.

Another argument that purports to justify anti-freshman sentiment goes like this: Freshmen just got here, so they don’t know what they’re talking about. For a lot of subjects, this holds true. Last month, in a comment to Logan Sander’s article “Privacy should be a right,” I wrote that men’s bathrooms should not have locks because men do not want them. Although this seems to be the overwhelming consensus among male freshmen and sophomores, another student informed me that men in upperclass dorms are frustrated with women frequenting their bathrooms. I had not known this. My freshman experience had precluded a viewpoint as nuanced as his.

In spite of this, the perspectives that freshmen offer are worth hearing. By the same token that my voice should not matter with respect to locks in upperclass dorms, a junior’s frustration should not influence what happens to bathroom locks in residential colleges. The experiences of freshmen and sophomores aren’t less valuable; they’re just different. It is crucial that first-year students have a voice, too, so that fresh minds can puzzle through issues that our older brothers and sisters have accepted as inevitable inconveniences of life in the Orange Bubble.

A 1967 study on the behavior of rhesus monkeys illustrates the pitfalls of ignoring the youngest group members. Five monkeys were put into a room where bananas rested atop a ladder. When a monkey tried to climb the ladder, they were all sprayed with a cold shower. Before long, they learned to avoid the ladder altogether. Then, one member of the group was replaced. The naïve monkey tried to climb the ladder, but the other four pulled him off and beat him in order to avoid the rainy punishment. Experimenters continued to replace the monkeys one-by-one, all of them beaten by their group when they reached for the bananas. Eventually, none of the four senior monkeys had been there to suffer the showers, but they still beat the new arrival who moved to climb the ladder. They couldn’t have known why they did it — they only knew that this was the way things were done. Silencing those with the least experience had created a culture where everyone accepted and perpetuated torment without knowing why, and this same phenomenon would cause progress to stagnate for student life if freshmen did not have a voice.

I am not defending the quality of any particular piece nor do I believe that freshman writers should be shielded from criticism. Sometimes in our haste to meet the obligations of the article cycle, we settle upon a bad idea. Other times we execute good ideas poorly. Sometimes we’re just wrong. Whatever the reason for a bad column, our failures are part of a learning process that will see us become better writers for the next three years. We’ll get better, and in the meantime, some of us will think of incisive ideas that only freshmen could have. Prepare for us to make a few more mistakes, but know that our voice is valuable.

Newby Parton is a freshman fromMcMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.