In the semester’s waning days one morning they appear suddenly: slim paperbacks with glossily inviting covers, stacked in tidy piles on library tables, on columns in the union, in the window wells of classroom buildings. They are picked up, pored over, pondered, passed from hand to hand. The student-written poems and photographs they contain are peaceful, savage, joyful, plaintive, beautiful. This is the Tower Light.
The Tower Light has a unique purpose among Hillsdale’s campus publications. The news would still exist without a Collegian to report it, and conservatives would still be opinionated if there were no Forum to print essays of conservative opinion. The Tower Light, on the other hand, is itself a catalyst for creativity, using the prospect of publication to wring literature out of members of a busy student body, who might otherwise never take the time to write that poem, take that photograph. In a sense, the Tower Light creates itself.
“It’s an imaginative space that writers can project into,” said Aaron Schepps ’14, who edited the Tower Light in fall 2013. “Those pages exist as a potential future destination for writing.”
Senior and current editor-in-chief LaRae Ferguson agreed: “The incentive of having your work published, I think, is really important in fiction and poetry and photography.”
2015 marks the sixtieth anniversary of Hillsdale’s student-published literary journal. Like other regular campus publications, the semesterly appearance of the Tower Light has become such a fixture on campus that it seems almost a piece of the campus itself, blossoming autonomously into print indoors as the trees blossom correspondingly outside. It bears its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.
Given this, it is perhaps surprising that the Tower Light was born essentially by accident. The Collegian has always been a campus newspaper. The Forum was founded in 2003 to be a political and philosophical magazine. Even the Pape, during its short four-year life, had a unified vision to which it held during its entire run. But the Tower Light began its life not as an independent literary journal, but as a Collegian-affiliated weekend magazine.
In the fall of 1954, Collegian editor-in-chief Rich Hill was attending the annual Associated Collegiate Press conference in Washington, D.C., when he mistakenly walked into a lecture he had not intended to see: a panel discussion on weekend magazine supplements for daily newspapers. Although the Collegian was, then as now, a weekly paper, Hill nevertheless carried the idea back to Hillsdale with him and convinced his coworkers to give it a shot.
In the preface to the first Tower Light, published in January 1955, Hill wrote, “It is our claim that the Collegian is the first newspaper to develop a slick-covered magazine edition among the small colleges of the nation.”
After five issues as a Collegian supplement, the Tower Light became an independent publication in late 1956.
Over the years, the Tower Light has also had its fair share of controversy. The earliest signs of dissatisfaction appear in a single-paragraph, intriguingly context-free announcement which appeared in the Collegian on Dec. 3, 1959.
“A small demonstration for the overthrow of the Tower Light will take place this Saturday, Dec. 5, at 7:00 p.m.,” it announced. “All those interested please attend.”
The publication has several times jockeyed with Student Federation over budget cuts. Current upperclassmen may remember the most recent example of this: in 2012, 80 students attended a Student Fed meeting to protest cuts to the publication.
“The good that came out of it was we got to see how much good the Tower Light does on campus,” said Assistant Director of the Dow Journalism Program Maria Servold, the faculty advisor to the Tower Light.
Despite these controversies, the Tower Light has become over the years a respectable literary journal in its own right. College Provost David Whalen said that this improvement is most evident in the graphic design of the publication.
“There was one year when the Tower Light was little more than photocopied pieces of paper staple-bound,” Whalen said. “The improved quality in the graphic design is extremely helpful, and lends the publication a seriousness and weight that flimsy and casual design simply doesn’t provide.”
But although today’s Tower Light is undeniably slick from a design standpoint, its true strength is in the rectitude of its mission and the beauty of its content. This publication exists not simply as a reservoir for beautiful things, but as a cultural project in which all Hillsdale students share. More than any other campus publication, the Tower Light binds its readers together as co-participants in the common pursuit of beauty.
“Boys, I should like to say one word to you, here at this place.”
This quotation, taken from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s staggering novel “The Brothers Karamazov,” appears as the epigraph in the opening pages of Fall 2013’s Tower Light. The quotation is taken from a scene in which the young priest Alyosha comforts a group of young boys who are grieving the death of a friend, one of their number.
At the conclusion of the same issue, Alyosha’s speech continues:
“And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honor or fall into great misfortune–still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.”
This is the Tower Light, too.
