Every day, the editorial staff at the UKrant wonders: What are we writing about, why are we writing about it, and how are we writing about it? ‘At UKrant’, an irregular column, we take a look behind the scenes.
It’s either meant to be funny with a serious undertone, or it’s meant to be serious with a funny undertone; there’s a petition on Instagram to change UKrant’s name to The Arts Gazette. Why? The (anonymous) petitioner feels that UKrant is ‘unilaterally focused on the Faculty of Arts and association faculties such as philosophy and religion, culture, and society’.
It’s as though the editors have ‘completely forgotten’ that the majority of students and staff have nothing to do with the arts faculty. ‘The current name wrongly implies that the UG has a newspaper. That’s why we want the name to be changed to The Arts Gazette, a name that more accurately represents its activities.’
Here in the editor’s room, we regarded the petition – which, by the way, hasn’t received many signatures yet – with some hilarity, although it also made us think. We’re always making sure to ask ourselves ‘who are we interviewing and where are our sources from?’
We’re very aware that it’s all too easy, when things are busy and deadlines are looming, to just go to the Broerplein or Harmonie square for some quotes, since these are just a stone’s throw away from our offices.
The current name wrongly implies that the UG has a newspaper
However, the largest and certainly not least prominent UG faculties, economy and business (FEB) and science and engineering (FSE) are located at the Zernike campus. ‘Don’t forget Zernike’, we tell almost every editor when they go out to get quotes. As well as: ‘Don’t go to the Broerplein, go to Zernike.’
Have we perhaps, in spite of our efforts, focused too much on the arts faculty? There’s only one way to find out, and that is to look at every article that UKrant’s ever published. To keep it comprehensible, I limited it to quoted sources in in-depth articles from 2025, and subjects of news articles from the start of this academic year.
The results are as follows: this academic year, UKrant published over four hundred news articles. Most of them by far – approximately 350 – were on general subjects: the budget cuts, how to deal with the use of ChapGPT, internationalisation, collective agreement negotiations, Big Tech, ACLO, etc. The arts faculty was mentioned, as were all the other ones.
A mere ten articles centred specifically on the arts faculty, whereas seventeen were about the Faculty of Science and Engineering, five about law, and three about the medical faculty.
Don’t forget Zernike ,we tell almost every editor
This calendar year, we’ve published around sixty in-depth articles. Of all the sources we spoke to, which includes both students and staff, 22 percent were from science and engineering, 16 percent from behavioural and social sciences (BSS), 7 percent from economy and business, 6 percent from law, and 8 percent from medical sciences.
And the Faculty of Arts? One out of four of our sources, either staff or student, has a background in arts. While that means it’s represented a little more often than other faculties, it’s by so little that we don’t think it’s justified to call us an arts paper.
Another factor is that this faculty offers a wide range of study programmes related to social issues that simply make the news more often than comet XYZ123 in a galaxy far, far away.
Nevertheless, I welcome the criticism from the academic community. It keeps us sharp and encourages us to visit Zernike even more often.
Rob Siebelink, editor-in-chief UKrant (aka The Arts Gazette)