Northwestern’s Editorial Technocracy
By Allen You
In my three years at Northwestern, I have tried to write thoughtfully about art in hopes that students would seriously engage with my writing and further a discourse about the subject that would prove meaningful towards our university education.
The obvious task for anyone in my position would then be to publish my work through Northwestern’s existing channels of writing. I thought my inexperience meant I would have to sharpen my writing to have a chance of getting published. Turns out, quality of writing wasn’t even on the table; Northwestern’s campus publications brush it aside for mere appeal.
At first, I tried to work with the campus magazines but soon became discontented with their editorial and design practices. My sophomore year, I exited the magazines and channeled my discontents in a three-part series of Daily op-eds about campus magazine production. These articles remain obscure to Northwestern’s magazine editors. They don’t care, and I doubt they ever will.
The publication of these op-eds motivated further attempts to work with the Daily. In March 2025, my friend Ben Katz and I submitted a piece defending a production of the play “Assassins” from its cancellation over its use of a slur. This was rejected, despite the heated discussion at the time, because “the quarter was about to end” and they wanted to “platform voices closest to this issue” instead.
I knew internally that the rebuff was a ruse. The piece was roughly 400 words with straightforward argumentation — not challenging to edit. But our opinion would not go down well with the noisy cohort of the play’s critics, and I believe the Daily avoided being a target of their wrath by suppressing our piece. The Daily didn’t even publish other opinions on the matter, rendering their already tendentious “platforming” claim moot.
Still undeterred, I published two other articles over the last year: a review on the student play “La Ventanita” and an opinion piece on Timothee Chalamet’s comments on ballet and opera. This work, I thought, put me on good footing to attempt something more ambitious.
Thus recently, I submitted a review of the Northwestern performance group TBD. At first, the Daily would not publish it as an A&E piece because it didn’t match the “standard format” of their theater review series “Curtain Call.” I argued for publishing the review outside of this format, but the Daily purportedly disallows this to stay “consistent” for their readers. After some negotiation, I further revised my piece to reflect the supposed rules of the “standard format,” and they agreed to edit it.
The Daily then reneged on this agreement and said I had to directly imitate the structure of other “Curtain Call” reviews. They argued that their reviews, unlike my piece, don’t deal in “general concepts of theater” like “improvisation and audience engagement” and include less “academic jargon” so that the “average reader” could understand the article. What constitutes “jargon” the Daily could not answer. Nonetheless, when I refused to give in to this new demand, the piece was thrown out.
The overarching pattern from my three years arguing with editors at Northwestern is their indispensable catering to the “average reader.” These editors assume, perhaps rightly, that their “average reader” does not want to read or think. In that case, campus publications should just dissolve as there is no real demand for them. But this is, apparently, an absurd conclusion, so the editors liquidate their own purpose instead, becoming decrepit foot soldiers in service of their “average reader.”
Regardless of how this “average reader” appears, the notion itself is a non-starter. Editors should not fold into the immediate desires of the audience. Rather, published writing should elevate and intervene in the audience’s ability to read and think, and editors who wish to maintain their position must recognize the reader’s desire to seriously engage with the writing, even when interest is not immediately apparent. When there’s conceptual slippage, writing must be willing to teach the reader, tasking the editor to intervene in the clarity of prose and argument. The specific value of the ideas should be left for the reader to interpret.
Editing should aspire to a literary and pedagogical practice. Northwestern’s editors instead surrender themselves into a technocratic formula, which has narrowly sustained campus publications since their move to the web. Limitless page space unleashes the mechanized production of stories on the latest events. Only bylines provide proof of life — if that.
This method is evidently unstable. The rigid pseudo-science used to appease their beloved “average reader” comes up against the dynamism of experience in society. To persist in this mode, even more perverse theories of the reader must then be developed. Meanwhile, the quality of writing falls entirely out of consideration. The “average reader” can’t help but notice this lack. Frustrated, silent, they eagerly switch tabs.
These undergraduate student "editors" are hiding their ideological censorship under the umbrella of their supposed "style guide". Just one of many manifestations of the Woke Mind VIrus that has captured Northwestern.