The following is a guest contribution and reflects the author’s views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.
For each winter USG election cycle, The Daily Princetonian Editorial Board publishes endorsements for a number of positions on the ballot. These editorials, signed by the nine members of the Editorial Board, represent themselves to be “the institutional voice of The Daily Princetonian,” which they claim to reflect the “consensus of a majority of the Board’s membership.” Because the ‘Prince’ is the most wide-reaching news source for undergraduate students on campus and the “endorsement piece” is the sole comprehensive guide to the elections that the ‘Prince’ publishes, students who read the piece will understandably treat the endorsements seriously if not authoritatively.
While the idea of endorsing candidates has merit, the nature of the endorsement process is flawed, opaque, lacks external accountability, and projects the confidence of an institutional voice while having unclear standards. Thus, rather than promoting democratic discourse around the elections that our campus sorely needs, the Editorial Board’s current practice of endorsing candidates risks narrowing it. I argue that the ‘Prince’ Editorial Board should not take positions on candidates, and leave individual ‘Prince’ Opinion writers to stake out their individual positions with respect to candidate endorsements.
It’s important to note the context of the media market in which the ‘Prince’ operates. The ‘Prince’ is the only campus publication that consistently covers USG elections. Outlets like the Nassau Weekly or The Princeton Tory neither consistently cover nor seek to provide comparably comprehensive information on ballot referenda and candidates.
As a result, voters who want guidance independent of the campaigns run by the USG candidates or referenda sponsors have nowhere else to turn. This is in contrast to the media landscape surrounding U.S. federal elections, where voters seeking information have different outlets to turn to. Compare the practices of the ‘Prince’ to, for instance, The Harvard Crimson. The Crimson’s editorial board does not endorse undergraduate student government candidates. Instead, their newsroom publishes debate coverage, platform summaries, and arguments from both sides on all competitive ballots. The ‘Prince’ newsroom, by contrast, focuses its coverage almost entirely upon the presidential ballot, with minimal information on down-the-ballot candidates.
In practice, ‘Prince’ endorsements monopolize campus discourse. Current USG president Enzo Kho ’26, who was not endorsed by the Editorial Board in December 2024, told me that endorsements “may inadvertently discourage students from running” since it may “become the single prevailing narrative … of the election.” Uma Fox ’26, who was the candidate endorsed by the Editorial Board for USG president last year, declined to comment due to time constraints.
Yet, even if campus discourse on the USG elections were more robust and vigorous, making endorsements more normatively defensible, there are still serious concerns with the process by which the Editorial Board determines these endorsements and publishes dissents. As I write this, I do not know who the Board will endorse this year.
The process by which the Editorial Board endorses candidates is not clearly codified nor publicized prior to its public announcement. In the December 2024 endorsement of USG candidates, the Editorial Board cites “questions to all declared USG Senate candidates” and the “USG presidential debate” as sources by which they determine endorsements, along with platforms. But the process by which the Board evaluates past experience is left unexplained. Oscar Barrios ’27, who is running for University Student Life Committee Chair, claims that the Board has “no real mechanism” to scrutinize candidate’s past records. Barrios was not endorsed by the Editorial Board in 2024.
While both candidates running for USG president this year emphasize the need for a clear and well-defined process and ultimately do not oppose editorial endorsements, Quentin Colón Roosevelt ’27 told me that the current system “is both rushed and too slow.” He points to a turnaround time of fewer than three days between when candidates receive questions and when they are expected to answer, as well as a similarly compressed schedule for writing and publishing endorsements. Such timelines, he contends, limit the quality of responses from both candidates and the Editorial Board’s endorsements. Aum Dhruv ’27 likewise stressed that the Editorial Board must “avoid any perception of favoritism.”
Moreover, tight turnarounds, like last winter’s Editorial Board endorsement that was published 37 minutes before voting opened, limit the ability of voices who are not on the Board to dissent.
Finally, the legitimacy of any endorsement process is dependent upon the trust we place in the people in charge of it. Here, too, the Editorial Board falls far short.
In recent years, the only publicly available information about the make-up of the Editorial Board is a short statement at the end of each piece that says it “consists of nine members: two managing editors, the Head Opinion Editor, and a group of six Opinion section editors, columnists, and contributing writers.” How the remaining six members are selected are thus unclear, and there are no clear standards by which reasonable criteria such as political or ideological diversity are taken into consideration.
The clearest and most recent statement about the mission of the group dates back to the 146th Editorial Board in February 2022. In it, they claim that their editorial board is a “diverse group of editors, hailing from different countries and belonging to many communities” and “represent a new generation of Princetonian editors who are committed to elevating voices on campus that have not historically been heard.” Whether the current editorial board claims to abide by these ambiguous aspirations is unclear. Christofer Robles, the chair of the 149th Editorial Board, declined to comment for this piece due to time constraints.
In a community as interconnected as Princeton, this opacity undermines trust. Students deserve to know by what process the members on the Editorial Board selected to judge their elected representatives by are selected, and whether the Board operates with any ideological or political bent. Many members inevitably occupy the same circles as the candidates they are tasked with vetting, and this raises questions on the extent to which endorsements reflect impartial evaluation absent clear and publicized rules for recusal or disclosure in the event of a conflict of interest.
The influence that the Editorial Board wields in shaping campus discourse can be broad. Given its endorsements, recent scrutiny of institutions like USG, or even its advocacy for other institutions to stand with Princeton against actions taken by the federal government, the Board itself must be subject to the same level of transparency, accountability, and critical examination that it routinely demands of others.
Yet, in its current form, the process for candidate endorsements undermines the legitimacy of the “institutional voice” which it claims to represent. We are unable to tell if the “majority consensus” of the Editorial Board’s positions reflect unanimous agreement among its members or a 5–4 split. To withhold this information is irresponsible to the readership of the ‘Prince,’ as they convey very different messages. The fact that only one public dissent has been published in the last five years makes it difficult to tell how effective opportunities for voicing disagreement exist.
Instead, the ‘Prince’ should encourage individual Opinion writers to articulate their own views. These could include the current members of the Board as well as informed community members, such as those currently serving in USG.
Otherwise, genuine differences in opinion are flattened into a single, ostensibly unanimous institutional position under current practices, which risks obscuring the plurality of perspectives that such a dominant student newspaper like the ‘Prince’ should strive to illuminate.
Jia Cheng “Anthony” Shen ’28 is a Chemical and Biological Engineering major from Tainan, Taiwan and Singapore. He may be reached at anthony.shen[at]princeton.edu.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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