On the heels of a widely talked about budget battle last spring, this fall’s Tower Light has the biggest editorial board ever.
The dispute about Tower Light funding was part of a larger effort by Student Fed to minimize excessive spending. Senior and Student Fed President David Wilhelmsen sought a more judicious approach to spending students’ money.
“Past Student Feds, they had done a lot of good things, but in general, the attitude was show up, say yes, and then get out,” Wilhelmsen said. “While a lot of the decisions made that way were good ones at the time, as you might imagine, approaching spending money that way usually isn’t the best thing to do.”
Student Fed’s officers began to examine the budget, trying to determine where they could make cuts. The Tower Light, according to Wilhelmsen, was an instance of overspending.
“Every indicator you could look at — talking to people, online surveys, looking at copies that were left over, and talking to the janitors who said that they threw away tons of copies — it just became obvious that 1,000 students weren’t all reading a copy of the Tower Light,” Wilhelmsen said.
Student Fed emailed then newly elected editor-in-chief of the Tower Light senior Aaron Schepps suggesting a decrease in the publication’s budget. Ultimately, Schepps and other lovers of the Tower Light attended Student Fed’s meeting and stood up for an unchanged budget. They disagreed with the some of the Fed’s figures and its point of view, believing that not just the quantity but the quality of the Tower Light was at stake.
“The budget had been fought for I think twice in the past few years to loosen it up because essentially we were publishing a pamphlet, and we wanted to be able to publish a book,” Schepps said.
In the end, it came down to a vote. All but one of Student Fed’s representatives (not including officers, who don’t vote) supported an unreduced budget. The budget was then and is now $5,850 per semester — $4,950 for printing and $900 to pay the salaries of the editor-in-chief, designer and photographer.
The printing budget may sound high for students unfamiliar with printing costs, but it is approximately $1,000 cheaper than the cost for printing The Collegian for one semester. According to Schepps, the Tower Light rivals Ivy League literary journals in form and is well worth the cost.
Assistant Professor of English Dutton Kearney said that he would “put the Tower Light up against any student literary publication in the nation.”
Schepps thinks the Tower Light is important, not only because it represents Hillsdale College and speaks for the literary talent that exists on campus, but it provides a community for students who want to write more than papers for class.
“The Tower Light gives every student, whether they get published or not,” Schepps said, “the opportunity to be a part of a literary community and have this kind of abstract, imaginative home for that part of them that loves to write.”
Tower Light editor and senior Josh Andrews appreciates this role of the Tower Light and sees it as a place for students to join in the most personal and instructive aspects of life.
“Poetry and writing is allowing so many different people to momentarily join with each other in this movement back toward the heart of God or this movement toward their parents or the movement toward the ends of education, and it’s incredible,” Andrew said. “To be an editor at that point is to enter into that with so many different people, and it’s something to cherish.”
