Letter to the Editor

David Wertime asked for a response to his column "Why Yale publications suck" [YH, 1/19/01]. As editors-in-chief of Hey! Zeus!, an interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study and promotion of the Classics at Yale, we are not sure that he necessarily deserves one for making such outrageous claims out of ignorance. Ignorance, however, is not something that should be met with silence.

Most egregious of his claims is that independent journals "fill nonexistent or invented niches," concluding that such efforts do not "truly advance our social or intellectual discourse." No doubt Wertime is not interested in our publication, just as we do not read all the journals that are published. But to bemoan the proliferation of independent publications, as Wertime does, without considering the interests that your fellow Yale students may hold is not only imposing your ideas of what is interesting and what is not on others, it is also deeply anti-intellectual.

We applaud the efforts of various publications for offering students the opportunity to learn about new things. It is our opinion that one becomes part of a community not by criticizing, but by engaging in debate.

—Charles Edel, CC '01, and Samuel Butt, JE '01

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