14 Points

14 Points is a journal for the 21st Century in that it strives to reconcile the more patient and considered prose of traditional academic publications with the flow and immediacy of recent innovations in communication. Its purpose is to provide a forum for students of the Woodrow Wilson School and related institutions, in particular, and anyone, more generally, with the opportunity to debate, learn about, analyze, and explore issues of public affairs. We call it a web-journal as opposed to simply a blog because we are open to submissions like a journal and have an editorial board that will review all potential entries from any interested author. We consider the editorial board necessary to ensure our delicate goal of publishing only high quality essays and commentaries, while expanding the privileges of authorship to as wide a group as possible. It is distinct from a print journal in the ways that it is also a blog. By allowing comments from any reader to be instantly posted and debated, by fostering links to empirical data and cited sources, and by granting more flexibility to publishing and style, it functions like a blog, not a journal. We hope that this marriage between blogging and journal publishing will make for a prolific and more perfect union between academia and public culture.

Since Woodrow Wilson was the eponym for our school, we felt it appropriate to evoke his most famous address when naming the publication. In light of contemporary circumstances surrounding American foreign policy such a decision could be interpreted in a variety of ways. It suffices to say, that we have no partisan agenda, and indeed, the editors’ views span across the political spectrum. Nonetheless, Wilson’s support for free commerce, the self-determination of nations, and international institutions may not be as idealistic as it is often deemed. He said that “All peoples and all nations …” have the “…right to live on equal terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong or weak.” These are not controversial statements even today, for they could be made by critics or defenders of contemporary American policies. To say that it is rhetorical equanimity, however, diminishes nothing from the value of the sentiment expressed therein, and it is with just such a cosmopolitan ethic of human equality, so essential to sustain inspiration, that we aim to carry out our writing and editing.

-The Editors