This week, UNC bids goodbye to The Minor , its online satirical publication. Since 2013, The Minor’s staff has published content focusing on life at the university.
Occasionally existential, frequently absurd and relentlessly iconoclastic, they honed an inimitable, authorial voice that was incisive, creative and funny. This is no mean feat for any publication, especially one staffed by unpaid students.
The Minor never developed the mass following of sites like Overheard at Carolina, UNC Memes or Yik Yak. In part this was because it trafficked in jokes that required a more substantial time investment than reading a quick tweet, though also because many of its topics — full merit scholars and student government politics, for example — simply did not interest everyone.
Yet on many occasions during the last two years, it felt as if the publication was doing more than making us laugh: It was shaping what students believed about pressing university issues.
With articles like “Y’all Should be Ashamed of Yourselves” by P.J. Hairston and “New Evidence Reveals Air Bud Took Only Paper Classes During 2009 Championship Season,” The Minor staked out a far more critical stance on student athletics than that adopted by the University.
During the 2015 student body president campaign, The Minor was quick to point out the weaknesses of the field. Not content to stop its critique there, it pilloried liberal activists on campus — its primary readership — for failing to run a candidate of their own.
Perhaps it was in its critical coverage of Greek affairs that The Minor did its best work. Its authors broke stories on a Vietnam War party at DKE and a racially tinged pledge task at Delta Upsilon.
One of their first hits, “Phi Mu Sacrifices Virginal Pledge in Macabre Derby Daze Gambit,” perfectly matched a ludicrous premise with a trenchant critique of the social dependence of sororities upon fraternities.
In a brilliant final week of publication, The Minor offered its readers one last taste of their unique brand: tackling campus race relations and the Carrboro music scene while taking one last shot at the Greek system before concluding with a wonderfully strange article on loneliness, alienation, a boat propeller and a decapitated brain.
