Editor’s note: This column is the collective opinion of members of our editorial board. This is not a reported piece.
It is a common sight to find a Spectrum staff member sleeping on a couch between the hours of 11 p.m. and 3 a.m on a weekday night in Student Union 132.
The nap follows production day: when Spectrum editors, reporters and photographers gather in the newspaper’s conference room to spend eight or more intense hours editing, rewriting, photographing, designing and publishing the week’s stories.
Through 76 years of meetings and protests, sports games and concerts, crises and triumphs, The Spectrum has been UB’s living historical record and its only serious journalistic endeavor.
The walls of the Spectrum offices are testament to the hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of meetings and dozens of aspiring journalists who have spent day and night toiling inside. The 10-foot chalkboard wall in the conference room is filled with the names of countless alumni. The archives are lined with binders of broadsheet newspapers — The Spectrum, The Bee, The Argus — and yearbooks from long before UB changed the “of” in its name to “at.”
The Spectrum’s big, windowless office has launched countless journalism careers. The names that hang on student-journalism award plaques in the office hallway can be found today on every newspaper, TV and radio station in Buffalo; in the pages of The New York Times and the front cover of Time magazine, on CNN and NPR — and on more than their share of Pulitzer Prizes.
That’s not to mention the Spectrum alumni who take their skills into law, marketing, the arts, medicine — countless fields where accuracy, truth, compassion and ethics matter.
All this, coming out of a windowless office in a university without a journalism major.
We should have known two years ago that UB didn’t want it to last — two years ago, when the university painted over The Spectrum’s hallway-length mural, making our office invisible to passersby.
This month, UB officials finally made their intentions clear. On May 20, when almost every student had left campus for summer break, Student Union Director Sue Kurowski told The Spectrum that the university will move the paper out, replacing its offices with a craft room and student lounge.
The Spectrum is set to be moved to three small, disconnected classrooms on SU’s top floor, UB officials said, with the ability to reserve two classrooms for production and editors’ meetings.
The university won’t knock down a wall, build out the space or even connect The Spectrum’s phone lines to the new rooms.
While we’re grateful that UB isn’t kicking us off campus entirely, we will no longer have a place at the heart of campus. Our doors will no longer open onto a bustling hallway used by almost every student, every day. We will be out of sight, and likely, out of mind.
When UB wanted space, did it tell the undergraduate Student Association or the Graduate Student Association to move out of their large offices? No — in fact, UB plans to provide both student governments with first-floor office space as part of Student Union’s master plan, so “students can find them more easily,” university officials say.
The “support, behind scenes type” offices — orientation, health promotion — are going to the third floor.
Perhaps to a university official, tucking The Spectrum “behind scenes” is an easy sell. After all, UB is working hard to brand itself as prestigious — a “top 25” public university in the making. The Spectrum covers UB’s reality — and it doesn’t always align with that brand.
The newsroom served as a reminder that journalism is alive. It was a place where years of Spectrum reporters dug into the truth and spoke up for those who could not — even, and especially, when it raised serious questions about the university’s actions.
But perhaps UB values a student lounge more. After all, when it closed the Strategist and Role Players Association’s computer lab, it converted it to a lounge. When it closed a queer community space in SU — with officers escorting out the students that ran it — it converted the room to a commuter lounge. Today, SU’s third-floor hallways are lined with unused, fluorescent-lit lounges filled with stained leftover furniture.
Perhaps to UB, that’s more valuable than student leadership in Student Union.
We will still be here. On late nights, our editors, staff reporters and photographers will be easy to find, scurrying back and forth between SU 306, 307 and 320.
Stories from students, faculty and staff are worth telling. We will continue to believe that, and if we have to carve out a space for it, we will.
The newsroom in SU 132 is set to end here, but years of Spectrum journalists are yet to come.
Join us.
The editorial board can be reached at opinion@ubspectrum.com.
