Welcome back and please, please submit pieces
Honghu Wang (2L) and Chloe Magee (3L)
It’s 2018. Tuition has risen to $38,183.45.1 The articling crisis looms larger than ever. And there’s a new McGill Guide. Welcome back, everyone.
In fairness, Dean Iacobucci is championing fundraising for student financial aid, now that fundraising for the Jackman Law Building has finished. The Law Society is, at least on its face, welcoming dialogue from students on articling reform (see our report on Page 8 and an op-ed on Page 27). The law school continues to improve Indigenous programming, such as the Indigenous Law in Context Weekend (see Page 7). Of course, we also have a comprehensive review of the 9th Edition of the McGill Guide (Page 8).
If none of the above succeeds in raising your spirits, perhaps a friendly reminder that legalized marijuana is right around the corner, in time for Halloween? Talk about a nice treat.
This year also marks Volume 20 of Ultra Vires. With this milestone in mind, we hope to continue to fulfill UV’s long-standing mandate of fostering dialogue on any and all issues of interest to the student community, including but not limited to tuition, articling, truth and reconciliation, and mental health (and probably not the McGill Guide, unless you’re one of the nerds on the law review).2 We are excited and humbled (read: terrified) by this responsibility.
We have also digitized our archives, available online, and will be drawing inspiration from the yellowed pages of UV in upcoming issues (stay tuned).3
Most importantly, we strongly encourage you to submit your pieces and feedback to UV. We rely entirely on your ideas and stories, and we’re hoping to hear from an increasingly broad cross-section of our community. This includes your best and worst hot takes, illustrations, poetry—literally (almost) anything. As one former UV editor put it, “you’d be surprised how low our standards can be.” More accurately, we know all of our classmates are brilliant and we’d like to provide an outlet for the creativity that too often takes a backseat to coursework.
This year, we’ve been #blessed with an impressive array of editors to work with you in readying your pieces for publication. Together, we hope to hear everyone’s voices reflected in your newspaper.
Fear not, the relatively sober tone of this letter in no way indicates that Diversions is taking a backseat. Quite the contrary. We’re bringing back cartoons, sharing the news stories we wish were real, and introducing UV Classifieds for the first time.4 In short, if you are among our faithful readers who rely on UV solely for a monthly dose of sarcasm, cynicism, and self-deprecation… well, nothing has changed.
Footnotes
1 In 1995, tuition was a mere $2,451. In 1999, the first year of Ultra Vires, tuition had increased to $8,000 for first-year students.
2 Disclosure: Honghu Wang (2L) is on the law review.
3 To be clear, we are referring here to the weathered pages, not the yellow press.
4 Probably. We haven’t checked the archives.
