Looking Back as the CI Celebrates its 10th Anniversary
An Interview With Former CI Writer, Government Visiting Instructor Zachary Courser
Daniel O'Toole
Last Updated: 12/19/06 Section: News
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Professor Zachary Courser: I came in a couple of issues into the first season of the CI. There were three guys initially to rediscover the CI. It was Ashwin Navin, L. John Nelson III, and Robert Dunn, and I think that the impetus behind it was that there wasn't a real representative publication on campus for conservative views. The political climate of the campus at the time was such where having something like the CI seemed needful. It wasn't being expressed in any other quarter, and there was a certain sense that there was a kind of intolerance for conservative ideas on campus, not necessarily at CMC but certainly at the five colleges and increasingly at CMC. Having a vehicle for expressing those ideas seemed needful, and so it was decided that CMC should have its own student publication that was devoted to conservative issues and they got started.
DO: Was the TSL competing at the time? Was Pomona the only campus providing a paper?
ZC: There were other papers on campus. There was The Forum, which was irregularly published. There was The Collage, which was the dominant five-college publication. The Student Life, as far as I could tell, didn't have a five college circulation. It was pretty much unique to Pomona. It seems like today they've managed to have a wider circulation; at least it gets wider attention over here than it used to. Those were the main student publications.
DO: Did you guys look back to the old CI that was published at Pomona? Did you look back to the old heritage?
ZC: No, there was a great deal of sui generis going on at the Claremont Independent. It was our own new thing, and we gave it its own character. We wanted it to be not a provocateur but something that inspired thought and debate on campus, and so it had a certain insouciant quality to it. We insisted on good writing, good editing, and thoughtful articles, but we also wanted to include a good deal of good-natured humor and articles that went beyond politics. We wanted to talk about student life or other types of social activities going on around campus that seemed appropriate to comment on from our particular perspective. So as far as the layout, and the character, and the motto "truth and excellence at the Claremont Colleges," that was all our doing, and it wasn't necessarily inspired by what came before. It was unique.
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