“The editors threaten and give ultimatums,” said former member Steven Stephens (20C), one of 38 writers who have left the Emory Wheel within the past year. “It’s like they expect us to try and it’s not fair! I just came to chill with the homies, write political opinion articles and boost my law school resume, but it’s just no longer fun anymore.”
His reasoning was similar to that of other former members who spoke to the Spoke, all of whom said that penalties for not completing articles in time and for making errors have created a toxic club culture.
However, lead editor Fay Knews and current Wheel members contest this narrative, stating that an effort to focus on finally getting people to actually read their papers and not immediately recycle them is laying the groundwork for future success.
All of the former members, who have quit the Wheel within the last year, attributed an unprecedented level of “enhanced interrogation” techniques and physical and verbal abuse to their leaving the organization.
“I missed my deadline for an article and they locked me in a maintenance closet in Dobbs and made me listen to Rico Nasty’s ‘Smack a Bitch’ for 8 hours straight,” recalled a former freshman member, who out of fear for repercussions from current writers wished to remain anonymous.
Sophomore business writer Ivan Jakinov (20B) spoke of another incident in which he made a grammatical error in an article. “They brought me to the warming tub in the WoodPEC and waterboarded me while making me perform practice problems from the ACT grammar section. It lasted for 17 hours straight.”
Another former writer maintained that the editors were “weeding out” writers to the point that “the club has lost what talent they had to begin with.” Editors began complaining that they were having to recruit freshmen along Eagle Row to write their front page articles.
Lead editor Fay Knews disputed these claims, reassuring us that all of the “enhanced interrogation tactics” they employed were designed to encourage cooperation and readership. “I have a feeling that this is the year where we finally get somebody to read a part of our paper that isn’t the crime report, but we’ve got to show our readers that we mean business if that’s ever going to happen.”
At the beginning of the fall 2019 semester, Knews and her co-editors implemented 42 new rules governing individual and club behavior. These rules exist in addition to the regulations set forth in the Emory Non-Academic Regular Person (NARP) handbook, also known as PACE.
Violations of the rules include having sex in any position except reverse cowgirl, asking freshmen of the opposite sex for DUC swipes, and speaking Spanish in any tense except the formal Usted.
Penalties include tarring and feathering, branding, dunking and being placed in public stocks in Asbury Circle.
“We just aren’t sure how much more of this we can take,” explained Junior Sports Editor Bo Ling (21B). “I think eventually all of us are going to quit and join the Spoke or something. They might get relentlessly bullied by everyone else on campus, but at least the abuse isn’t physical.”
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