Viviana Aldous, Editor-in-Chief

For the better part of the last three years, I reported for work in The Daily Texan basement more days than not. As a news reporter, I attended student and state legislative meetings and gained insight into the workings of the University. As an editor, I examined the newspaper from the perspective of a reader and not just a writer. As a result of my experience at the Texan, I understand the issues facing students, faculty and staff.

The opinion page is where you’ll read about topics ranging from budget cuts to Rick Perry’s campaign for presidency. We want to have your input on the issues that impact you most. Submit a guest column or a firing line. With your help, the opinion page will reflect the issues our readership cares about and will remain a place for discussion and dialogue for members of the campus community.

Aldous is a Plan II and philosophy senior.

Shabab Siddiqui, Associate Editor

I joined the Texan my freshman year because I was the nerd who liked to write. I guess I’m still here because neither the “nerd” nor the “like to write” has worn off yet.

I’ve spent the last couple of years working at The Daily Texan in various capacities and getting involved with student legislative bodies. I have covered the faculty and the administration while also working with faculty members and administrators.

I was careful never to cross the conflict-of-interest line. Yet no matter what side I stood on, I always had a vested interest in the conflict.

The first speckles of controversy emerge when a culture of layering makes things too complex for most people to understand. It is the boiling point where individuals can maim and mangle thoughts into polarizing arguments.

I think that is our charge at The Daily Texan: to turn debates back into discussions, to toss out thoughts and ideas and have all of you place it on a scale from ingenious to idiotic. To do that, maybe we need to be poring over budgets and sitting in meetings. Or maybe we need to be illustrating issues by referencing basketball, Taylor Swift and Harry Potter.

We all have a tendency to believe that our time is the most important or most challenging or most monumental in the history of humanity. I don’t know if that’s true as much as we need to pretend it’s true to ensure we bring it on a day-to-day, column-to-column basis.

But what do I know? I’m just a nerd who likes to write.

Siddiqui is a finance and government junior.

Matt Daley, Associate Editor

I’m still somewhat new here. This past summer, I wrote a weekly opinion column for The Daily Texan, but that’s about as far back as my experience goes. Though, as a senior biology student and former Student Government representative, I’m not quite new to UT.

It’s really an interesting time to be here. Over the past year, UT has found itself at the center of a lively discussion about the role of public universities in our rapidly changing state. The University’s budget has been cut and its class sizes increased. Ensuring that student opinion helps to shape the direction in which the University moves going forward is something I have been and remain passionate about.

And I don’t mean for “interesting” to be a stand-in for “gloomy.” Longhorn football returns in less than two weeks. UT remains one of the best universities in the nation and Texas remains one of the best places in the country to be a new college graduate.

As an associate editor, I hope to bring attention to issues, good and bad, that affect our campus. And as someone who has contributed guest columns and firing lines to this paper in the past on topics ranging from ethically questionable Student Government elections to the theoretical soundness of evolution versus the intellectual emptiness of creationism, I hope to encourage others in the campus community to think and write about these important issues, too.

Daley is a biology and government senior