Every Tuesday, TSL’s senior staff meets in Walker Lounge to plan the next issue, from a news story on the Black Student Union Town Hall to opinion pieces highlighting different perspectives on the U.S. war with Iran. TSL is quick to cover current events affecting diverse populations, but if you look around the senior staff meeting, it feels a lot less diverse than a 5C dining hall. Though most students talk about important issues over dinner, not all students feel TSL is the right place to share their opinions.
In the spring of 2021, TSL created two paid senior staff positions for Diversity and Inclusion Editors and released its first demographic data report.
The Diversity and Inclusion senior staff positions no longer exist. Instead, TSL now has a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) committee which is open to all staff, but is currently composed only of senior staff and the editorial board. Not only are none of the members of the DEI committee Black or Latine, but none of the TSL’s twenty seven senior staff members are either.
This article’s demographic data report marks the first report of its kind since the fall of 2023. 61 out of about 90 TSL staff participated in the survey.
It’s important to note that in asking staff to self-categorize, the complexity of racial background is not fully capture: Biracial or mixed students, for example, are not accurately represented in these classifications. For context, these are the racial breakdown statistics as self-reported by Pomona, Scripps and Pitzer.
The lack of diversity in TSL isn’t just visible in demographics data; it affects what’s on the page. TSL is shaped by unique student perspectives whose writing determines what topics are written about, who is interviewed and how stories are portrayed. The composition of TSL influences the broader campus climate, leading to an incomplete understanding and representation of the diversity of our student body. When limited views or voices are highlighted, many students will feel less inclined to share theirs.
Lack of racial diversity isn’t exclusive to TSL, but is characteristic of journalism as a whole; white people make up 61 percent of the U.S. population, but 76 percent of journalists. Yet student newspapers like TSL, which have a lower barrier of entry compared to professional publications, have the opportunity to create more space and offer more support for journalists of color.
On the surface, TSL has more gender diversity than the average newsroom; Though women make up 46 percent of journalists in the United States, they make up the majority 67 percent of TSL’s staff.
However, upon closer examination, of the small number of men who are in TSL, the majority of them are senior staff. Despite being a minority of TSL writers by a large margin, men are nearly half of TSL’s senior staff. Looking at the gender as well as racial breakdown of senior staff is key, as senior staff have the authority to accept pitches from writers, make final edits to their articles and guide coverage as a whole.
In recent years, a nationwide decline in print journalism and increasing administrative censure of student voices, among other shifts in the political climate, have contributed to the shrinking number of publications at the Claremont Colleges and other universities. In this process, the consortium community has suffered a decline in the diversity of voices that tell the stories and create the historical record of the 5Cs.
However, it’s important to recognize that marginalized students have historically shaped 5C journalism. Previous student newspapers at the 5Cs have centered on diversity, namely the feminist newspaper the Re-View and the multicultural newspaper Harmony. Both papers began and ended within the 1990s, though the Re-View continued briefly into the 2000s as a literary magazine.
In the Re-View, whose purpose was to “create a forum for the expression of feminism in diverse forms,” students addressed issues from fraternities to abortion rights to ecofeminism. One unique aspect of the Re-View was its non-hierarchical structure. All staff members participated in all aspects of production; there was no senior staff. The Claremont Independent’s first iteration, founded by students at Pomona College, served as a home for conservative rebuttals to the progressive viewpoints of the Re-View.
Harmony, which was sponsored by the Office of Black Student Affairs and composed mainly of students of color, was founded to “serve as a vehicle for constructive dialogue within the diverse Claremont community.” Each issue of Harmony focused on multicultural responses to topics like feminism, racism on campus and the ongoing Gulf War. An editor in chief of Harmony described it as “a thorn in the flesh of those who insist on glossing over the perspectives and rights of people of color.” Harmony emphasized that participation in student journalism is an extension of political participation.
TSL’s senior staff in 2026 is much less racially diverse than Harmony’s senior staff in 1993. The students who were represented in the senior staff of Harmony are still present on campus, yet absent in the TSL newsroom. Where should student journalism at the Claremont College go from here?
Inclusivity must go beyond accepting every application to TSL, which is how the paper currently operates. Instead, TSL must intentionally encourage students from communities present on campus but underrepresented in the consortium’s paper of record to apply — and not only for writing positions, but also for senior staff. Additionally, in TSL, “underrepresented” extends beyond race and gender; right now, Pomona College, Pitzer College and Scripps College make up 90 percent of TSL staff. The only Mudders involved at the time of publication are crossword creators.
Pomona, which funds TSL and describes diversity as “crucial to [its] educational mission,” must also recognize that how students at TSL are paid affects which students participate. Writers at TSL are not paid. Only senior staff are; depending on the position, non-managing editors are paid 1.5 to 4.25 hours per week regardless of how many hours are worked. In contrast, the student newspaper at Wesleyan, a peer liberal arts college, has a fund which allows the paper to offer paid reporting positions to low income students of color.
If working for the TSL was seen as a desirable job, rather than just an interesting extracurricular, a wider variety of students would be able to contribute. Thus, creating a more diverse TSL also requires administration at the 5Cs to fund a more diverse TSL.
TSL’s diversity problem is a work in progress, but we want you to be part of the progress. Next time you complain to your friends during dinner or wonder why a topic important to you is never discussed, please consider sharing your thoughts with the wider campus via TSL or reaching out to our publication through editor@pomona.tsl.edu, or tsl.news on instagram.
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