Bigger Picture

Colonel Cathcart, in Joseph Heller’s classic novel “Catch-22” constantly derided Yossarian, the book’s main character, for his resistance against undertaking more aerial combat missions. Cathcart persistently repeated that the refusal was a real “black eye” and wished Yossarian would put a “feather in the cap” of the army by agreeing to the task.

Temple’s administration, in this case Colonel Cathcart, would likely want The Temple News to cease printing stories regarding the administration’s paychecks or the president’s million dollar condominium. But, we’ve done it again, this time reporting on pay hikes given to a number of university officials in order to make their salaries more competitive.

Is this newspaper a metaphoric Yossarian, caught in a catch-22 between blindly supporting the university and blindly opposing it?

No.

Like Yossarian, we report on certain topics not to intentionally stick our finger into the eye of the university, but because doing otherwise would be selfish and would betray our fellow soldiers, err, students.

We hope to be given reliable information by university staff and to present that information as best we can to the Temple community in an articulate voice.

We trust students and staff to put the facts into context and to make their own assessment regarding the logic behind decisions made by the administration.

Is restructuring the Honors Program a proposal that would work well in practice, or will it invariably harm the program’s current dynamic?

Will recent salary hikes just level the playing field between our university’s administrators and others around the country that get paid more in the same position? Or, is it just an example of Temple throwing money at elites?

You decide.

Students should know what Temple is striving to become and how it is accomplishing those goals. We want to facilitate a flow of information that gives students a clearer understanding of the university’s motives, and if that means a black eye or a feather in the cap of the university, then so be it. The reporting and writing in our articles will be as objective as possible, and the interpretations of the words we print are ultimately in the eyes and mind of our readers.

This publication hopes to strengthen the foundation of Temple University by providing a free flow of reliable details regarding the inner workings that make this campus function, not invariably damage it.