Rhys Adams, Editor-in-Chief

Last year, I nearly tore my hair out waiting for Jason and Adrienne to turn in their senior reflections for our grad issue, which we sent to our printing company several hours after it was due. Today, it feels as though the last lesson those two superb student journalists taught me about editing The Milton Paper has come twelve months after they graduated: these farewells are damn hard to write. I don’t know if Paper readers would be better served by advice, reflections on publications this year, or commentaries on the state of Milton. As such, I will go out on a limb and try to combine the three into a coherent appeal: resist the rhetoric of inevitability.

I came to Milton uninterested in student newspapers, ever since an ill-fated attempt to create one back in fourth grade—several of my writers rebelled when I asked them to properly punctuate their articles. Only in my sophomore year did I embark upon two productive reportorial ventures: my journalism elective, in which I enrolled only because the term “media literacy” was in the course title, and an interscholastic international relations periodical called Diplomacy Decoded, which, at its height, featured five writers from Milton and twenty from other high schools. The irony of that year rested in the fact that my course was gradually teaching me that nearly everything about how I was running Diplomacy was dead wrong. I haven’t been allotted the space to bore you with the details (count your blessings, dear reader), but they were compelling enough that, as a junior, I suspended Diplomacy to cut my teeth as opinion editor for The Milton Paper.

This publication has taught me more than any other extracurricular affiliation at Milton or before. I’ve learned how to fight unabashedly for people who disagree with me, how to decouple my vision of success from the approval of authority figures, and how to build teams that implicitly treat people like they’re smart, because they are. These lessons did not simply materialize as I worked; my senior mentors and I had to search for them in uncomfortable and counterintuitive settings. As I consider who I would be had I trusted in the inevitability of gradual revelations along my previously established path, I am grateful that I didn’t. I have Dr. Nurenberg, Adrienne Fung, Caroline Blake, Jason Yu, and Annaka Schmults to thank for that.

It’s easy to rationalize inertia. Often, “the way things are going” appears natural and right by default, but trusting that appearance uncritically is fallacious. Our editorials this year calling for phone-free zones, fewer class cancellations, more openness to honest feedback, and a reduction in performative burnout converge in their intention to somehow break inertia, a goal that the readings Mr. Margraf assigned me this month—Hito Steyerl’s Medium Hot, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby,” and Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Lecture—have validated. I want to dissent from a particular form of inertia that has taken hold at Milton and beyond: the insistence that we ought to “incorporate” all widespread technologies into our model of education because of their prominence in the “real world.” Smartphones and GenAI are designed for ease of use; their absence in Milton’s curricula will not inhibit students from existing alongside them outside of school. Reworking syllabi around AI toys—which Milton, thankfully, hasn’t done—and downplaying a culture of AI cheating so endemic that even (optional!) student publications have had their submissions flooded with artificial content—which Milton, in the coming years, has the option to do—surrenders to “inevitability.”

The Academy, through all of its remarkable intellectual opportunities and luminous minds, has taught me that I should think harder than assuming inevitability. That lesson is worth keeping in mind. Leading this paper has been a unique honor and a profound joy. Thank you to my co-editors; all of our staff and contributors; our faculty sponsor, Mr. Idsvoog; and my English teachers, Mr. Quiñones, Ms. Figueroa, Lou Kinder, and Dr. GwinnLandry. Most of all, thank you for reading.