Fall 2021Special Edition

Reckoning and Rebuilding

The Trail office Fall 2021 after over a year of not being inhabited (Audrey Davis/The Trail)

A note from your friends at The Trail

After a semester-long hiatus, and a whole year prior with only virtual publication, The Trail is finally back. This publication is rebooting at a time when a significant portion of the student body is unaware that the University of Puget Sound has a campus newspaper at all. 

As the student body leads an era of reckoning, acknowledgement of past misdeeds is necessary for all campus contingents in this moment. In order to move forward equitably, The Trail must acknowledge the harm and pain inflicted on the community. In its long history, The Trail  published demeaning and racist material. Wrongdoings were often overlooked and swept under the rug; though in recent years, accountability efforts for these actions began (see: “On racism in satire: A response to the March 15 Combat Zone cartoon”). The Trail’s goal moving forward is to bring this problematic history to light in a manner that allows for healing and growth rather than the perpetuation of harm.  

Under new leadership, with a new staff, The Trail will be returning in full force as a physical print newspaper in 2022 for the first time since the onset of Coronavirus. A new section dedicated to unearthing and republishing interesting information from the archived editions of The Trail will now be a regular feature of the newspaper. This paper and its staff hope that in doing so, attention can be drawn to the long history of student activism on campus and ground the current moment in the context of the university’s history. 

The value of honest journalism on this campus cannot be understated. Without it, the campus history of movements for justice, the nature of student life, and student voices would be severely lacking from our archives. Real student journalism brings the campus community together here and now, and provides an important historical record for the future.