I don’t believe this is the time for me to reflect on my tenure at The Criterion. I don’t believe enough time has passed.

Even as I pack up my office, dust off my desk, place my awards and pens into the cliched cardboard box, I still do not have a reasonable grasp on how Colorado Mesa University has impacted me, and how I have impacted it.

I entered this newsroom only two years ago, staring at the editor in chief’s office as if it were the Holy Grail itself. I wanted to be the best I could be at a time when the articles I submitted were — rightfully — edited to near-eradication by the time they made it to print.

Since then, I have faced my highest highs and lowest lows. Moments of incredible doubt and moments of remarkable vindication. They all helped me grow, improve and recognize my faults.

I don’t believe this could have been achieved anywhere else than the home of the Mavericks. The lessons I have learned at this university have left me a better man and a better journalist.

Students and administrators alike — at least some — believe I hate my school. That is not true and the thought that disappoints me most. Everything I have done at this paper, every investigation and every piece of commentary, has been in the pursuit of improving the university I have called home for four years.

I would not call for the student government to better represent its students if I wanted CMU to be worse off.

I would not call on CMU to improve its online event calendar if I wanted fewer people to attend school events.

I would not call CMU boring if I wanted it to remain so.

This is not to say that CMU is full of faults. It is most certainly not, and I believe we at The Criterion have called attention to those who make CMU the way it is. It may be a cliche, but it is our belief that we have spoken truth to power.

Students who improve this community, artists who give everything they got and athletes who time and time again come back to our humble Grand Junction with awards and national recognition — these are the students who define CMU, along with those who seek to improve it.

I hope one day the Associated Student Government will achieve the heights the senators discuss, I hope event participation records are smashed year after year and I hope CMU can be a place for students to forge their own path.

The only way to do so is to question and to criticize and to applaud. I cannot improve as a leader or a journalist without your criticisms, just as CMU cannot become the university it sorely deserves to be without addressing its faults and missteps.

This is The Criterion’s role — to speak up when others whisper and to ask questions when others just nod. I hope I have achieved this. If so, I also hope this newspaper can remain the watchdog the university so desperately needs.

Without The Criterion and its student journalists, better bathroom access for handicapped individuals may not have been achieved, students may have never known how their money is being spent by the student government or how they are operating altogether.

My critics keep me humble, but they can never take away the pride I have in The Criterion’s proven ability to spread the truth.

Whether you have agreed or disagreed with the decisions I have made this year, I hope that you take away — as I have — an improved appreciation of the rights we have as Americans to speak our opinion and dig for the facts, and the freedoms we have as Mavericks: to be independent, to be unorthodox.

This life is short. College is shorter. Live it well and make it yours.

Thank you, CMU, to those who have mentored me and those who have challenged me. You will never know how grateful I am.

Best,

Alec Williams

Editor in Chief of “The Campus Criterion”