Editorial: Capturing UCLA’s best and worst of the year

Four people at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta maintain a database of time capsules. They say they have about 20 from various colleges registered with them, but they estimate the actual number is in the thousands. MIT alone has at least nine that they’re aware of.

Which got us thinking: What would we put in a time capsule? Seeing as it is the paper’s job to cover the highs and lows of life at UCLA, we looked over the year’s stories and found the five best and worst moments from the 2007-2008 school year.

The best

1. The new chancellor. We welcomed the University of Virginia’s Gene Block with a celebratory barbecue a few weeks back, but he embarked on his chancellorship here in the fall.

2. UCLA went from “First to 100″ to “First to 103″ with NCAA titles in women’s water polo, men’s golf and women’s tennis.

3. Undergraduate Students Association Council members met most of their goals for this year. More street lights in Westwood and additional options for students to minor in were among the highlights of their achievements this year.

4. Student events were incredibly successful. The JazzReggae Festival, Spring Sing, Dance Marathon and Mighty Mic all raised money for their respective charities and created great memories and brief bouts of exhaustion for organizers and participants.

5. UCLA organized BruinAlert, a system intended to inform students about emergencies. Speakers on campus and on the Hill were tested recently, and a mass text message was sent out to all the students who enrolled in BruinAlert.

The efforts of students, professors and administration this year improved UCLA’s reputation and campus safety. Many, many people deserve praise for their hard work. Sadly, the school year was not entirely without incident. Here are our five least favorite moments from the past 10 months.

The worst

1. The UC Regents increased student fees, leading to protests and 16 students’ arrests.

2. The Animal Liberation Front continued to terrorize professors, including an attack on a UCLA researcher’s home.

3. UCLA lost ““ again ““ in the Final Four, and we were forced to return the Liberty Bell to USC after December’s football defeat.

4. The dentistry school’s credibility took a huge blow when the Daily Bruin reported that bribes had contributed to some students’ acceptances.

5. USAC fell victim to scandal when a wayward e-mail revealed that members had been siphoning money from the student-fee-funded organization to hire nonexistent speakers.

It’s been a long year, and certainly an exciting one. Three members of our editorial board and many newspaper staff members will be joining the ranks of fresh-faced college graduates in two weeks. Juniors are already starting to freak out about their senior theses, and next year’s freshmen have already begun the many trips to Bed Bath and Beyond to buy laundry hampers and twin-extra-long sheets.

It happens this way every year. By the time you’re used to something and comfortable with it, it changes. But as we all prepare for the next chapter in our lives, we wanted to thank you for reading our editorials, for writing us back when you didn’t agree, and even for tossing the occasional obscene phone call our way. We appreciate your readership. After all, without students, we’d be a pretty pathetic school newspaper.

Have a great summer!

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