Dear Readers,

It is a rite of passage for every student journalist to write an article that is so provocative and wildly inappropriate for a high school newspaper that it immediately gets shut down by the newspaper’s teacher sponsors. Up until today, I have always had complete faith in the Radnorite teacher sponsors to reject my articles of this nature. When I founded The Radish, my mission of providing meaningful insights through the genre of satire was secondary to my goal of testing the limits of my teacher sponsors to the point where they threatened to remove me from my post as editor and discontinue the publication. I have never been disappointed by the unfailingly moral and principled judgements of the teachers that preside over cases of extreme subversion. 

However, as the title to this article suggests, my dream of earning the award of merit that is a teacher sponsor’s resounding and emphatic opposition to an article I write is endangered by the administration’s recent decision to take censorship duties upon themselves. I cannot help but think to myself that this is an assault on the very principles that guide my writing. As a journalist with experience and integrity, however, I would never dare to make an unsupported claim. Therefore, I will explain why the administration’s recent crack down on teacher sponsors’ right to censor articles warrants a likely-to-be-censored article of its own, written from the perspective of a student who consequently will no longer be censored by the original censors due to censorship from superior censors with less experience in the field of censorship, not to mention the complex subdivision of censoring censors who previously censored uncensored non-censors (the students).

The administration’s ability to cause teacher sponsors to step down takes the joy out of being censored by my direct superiors. In filling the position of oversight left vacant by the exiled sponsor, the administration developed a new structure in which they communicate their disapproval for articles through our one surviving teacher adviser. This process dilutes the sting of rejection that I grew fond of while being reprimanded directly by my teacher sponsors. I valued my teacher sponsors’ wise and thoughtful advice when they told me that “Your article should not be published in the Radnorite and should not be published in any newspaper anywhere or ever.” I do not experience that same rush with indirect censorship that comes in the form of forcing out the teachers responsible for criticizing and scrutinizing my work and replacing them with people who have not earned the right to dissect and subsequently discard my work. 

To explain this phenomenon, I typically use the analogy of grandparents attempting to override the authority of their grandkids’ parents. For context, this scenario is applicable to grandparents who mistakenly believe they can decide what their grandkids eat for dinner, wear to school, or do in their free time. If you are thinking, This is crazy, how could the grandparents have the power to tell their grandkids what to eat for dinner when that is obviously the responsibility of the parents, and if the grandparents are able to freely interrupt the affairs of a functional family, then is there hope for The Radnorite?, then I have successfully communicated my message to you. I hope that this article has been informative and even enlightening. Unless this situation changes, I am excited to bring you satires on whatever the administration approves. 

Sincerely,
Andrew Rosin