Lack of preparation on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Recently, many letters to the editor have been sent to the ET news e-mail.
We have been bombarded over the last few days with phone calls trying to make sure the letters will be printed because the author of the letter would receive extra credit in a specific class.
While we greatly appreciate the feedback we receive regarding comments on published articles or campus happenings, we cannot publish every letter to the editor we receive – especially if that letter was sent only one day prior to publication.
It is not our responsibility to print letters to the editor for extra credit purposes. The ETSU community must understand that we work on a specific and concrete deadline and just because you are failing a class which promises extra credit if your letter is published does not mean we will publish the letter.
Most of the letters we have received over the past few days have been solely for the purpose of extra credit in a class. Publication of letters to the editor is at the discretion of the viewpoint editor and executive editor. We have a specific letters policy which is printed in every issue of the paper that is strictly adhered to. If you turn in a letter to the editor on the day of publication there is a high probability the letter will not be published in the upcoming issue.
While we try our best to print every letter to the editor we receive, it is not fair to us or the publication to be inundated with phone calls about letters that are irrelevant to subject matter printed in the ET.
Also, the purpose of letters to the editor is to comment on recently published articles or ideas set forth by the East Tennessean. It is not to be used for letters to your best friend, as an advertisement of any sort or as a soapbox for conveying personal opinions irrelevant to campus activities.
For those of you who wish to have a voice on campus, we are currently accepting applications for positions like columnists and writers and they can be picked up in the ET office.
If the extra credit requires that you relate current news to history to prove how history repeats itself, then we ask that you make the letter relevant to an article that has been published in our paper. For instance, we have many political columnists and our news stories can be directly related to some event in the past that a student wanting extra credit could write a letter to the editor about.
We appreciate the professor who offers extra credit for letters to the editor. We understand it is not his fault and we appreciate the publicity he has given us. But, we cannot accept letters from people who procrastinate and cannot accept the rude behavior which follows when a letter is not printed.
Thank you, professor, for trying to boost our readership and we do not ask that you change your extra credit policy. We do ask, however, that letters be sent to us in a timely matter, adhere to the letters policy rules and be relevant to the publication.

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