In the 1980s Dartmouth’s student magazine, the Dartmouth Review, started a revolution amongst University Conservatives. Amidst a climate that was hostile to conservatives much like today, the Review paved the way for students to have a voice on left-leaning campuses The Dartmouth university review’s pioneering staff gave hope to a generation of young Conservative thinkers.
Since then, Conservative publications have sprung up all over the United States thanks to the generous donations of such Conservative demagogues as William F. Buckley and foundations like the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and the Collegiate Network. Since the founding of the Review, however, no Conservative Collegiate magazines have been as notable as that of Brown University’s. The Brown Spectator, founded in 2002, has become an iconic example of how Campus Conservative Magazines should be constructed.
Founded in the days after a reparations article by David Horowitz sparked enormous, nationwide controversy, the articles were long-form essays put together by on-campus college students. At the time the articles were extremely relevant, but four years later, the magazine was nothing more than the remnants of a bygone era that college students no longer remembered.
Since then, the Spectator has completely turned its model around. This model, conceived by student Editors Andrew Kurtzman and Joshua Unseth, has been a successful one at Brown University. The changes have worked incredibly well. More college students are reading the Spectator, and as a result, editors have continually increased the number of issues printed.
After working with the Spectator, Joshua Unseth turned his eyes on a new goal. He went out and obtained the funding for Closing Remarks, Brown University’s first Christian literary and arts publication. Unseth put together a staff of amazing artists and writers who turned the magazine into a well written, artistically rich periodical. “I purchased ten different magazines that I liked from the Brown University book store and brought them to a staff meeting,” Unseth said. “We crawled through each journal and pulled out elements that we liked. In the end, Closing Remarks is an amalgamation of elements from Harper’s, the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Good Magazine, about five other publications, and the imaginations of the founding staff.” The magazine is all the better as a result. Closing Remarks looks like a magazine you’d see on a shelf at Barnes & Noble.
The articles range from the controversial articles by students who support gay marriage and who will argue that Biblical principles back up their point, to depressing articles about dealing with death, to humorous articles about virginity, all the way to articles discussing proof of God’s existence using scientific and mathematical principles. As you can tell, Closing Remarks is a forum for all ideas. All that Unseth asks is that his writers do their best to think well. And he adds a caveat: “we invite counterpoints and our writers know that.”
As was the case with campus Conservative publications in the 1980s and throughout the 90s, Christian publications have recently been springing up all over the nation. In just the last few years more than 10 magazines have appeared on college campuses in the US. Unseth says that Closing Remarks was by no means the first. It might have been the third or fourth magazine of its kind. But even if Closing Remarks wasn’t the first student-run Christian publication in the country, it in no way diminishes the work Unseth can be credited for. With the Spectator, Josh made sure that the underrepresented Conservative population of Brown University was heard. With Closing Remarks, Unseth gave the Christians a voice. Provacative and intelligent, Joshua Unseth and students like him are the future of what some are calling a dying industry.
The Brown Spectator is full of great articles like Noam Chomsky.