A New Generation on the Right
Andrew Tutt, Pratt ’09
Production Editor 2007-2009

Before the Gothic Guardian, even before the New Right Review which preceded and ultimately transformed into the Guardian, one of the longest lived and most successful publications at Duke was the Conservative Union’s own New Sense magazine.

New Sense differed from a lot of other publications at Duke, in part, because the authors within it wrote with the intention of being read. They were partisans who, for reasons of their own, eschewed the conventional outlets for opinion on campus and built for themselves a venue through which to make their stand, and they wanted above all, to be read.

As college writing has evolved over the last two decades, and especially now in the face of blogging and information overload, the notion of writing for an audience has fallen by the wayside. Read your average column in The Chronicle and you’ll have difficulty figuring out to which audience the author is pandering — because columnists there are writing for themselves. Indeed, what once was a sickness has become an epidemic, the narcissitic notion that one does not write to entertain another, to inform another, to attract the attentions of another — no, one writes for his or her own self-satisfaction. I think it an unfortunate turn of events that diary style monologues have now taken over what once was a fierce and robust discipline.

Perhaps that above all is why I joined the Gothic Guardian’s fledgling staff when we first began this endeavor. The people who started it, wanted to write in it, and wanted others to read what they wrote. This was not begun for line 7 of the resume, or to win a scholarship or show off leadership — we started it because we wanted to change minds and influence people to think more about their lives.

For the two years for which I have been a part of the publication, I think we have achieved that goal in some measure, and I look forward to passing the torch now, to a new generation, for whom I hope the same flame still burns.