Marriage of Interests

During a recent lunch break, we visited College Hall and the first-floor office of Campus — "A Magazine for the Dartmouth Community," so the printed business card said. In a skinny room that has a pair of glass doors which face the green and that still serves as a coatroom and office supply storeroom for the Tucker Foundation, we talked with the publishers — Andy Lewin '81 and Steve Levitan '82. They were sharing a large table which functions as desk, file cabinet, storage area, mail center, and lounge chair for visiting staff members. While Lewin finished typing a letter and Levitan talked on the phone, we read the magazine's prospectus.

Campus — a free, biannual, student-run publication. Content — no specific guidelines, literary board will publish any quality piece of general interest to the Dartmouth community. Some contributors — Noel Perrin and Bill Cook, professors of English; Charles Wood, professor of history. Faculty adviser — Harry Schultz, emeritus professor of English. Circulation — 12,000, including students, faculty and staff, Hanover residents, and selected alumni. Financing — advertising will allow Campus to be self-supporting. Initial funding — donations from Tucker Foundation, Hopkins Center, Committee on Student Organizations, Dean of Students Office, and loans from members of the directorate. Profits — to be reinvested.

As we finished browsing through the prospectus, a Tucker Foundation secretary on her way to lunch came into the office to grab her overcoat and apologized for disturbing us. Finished with his letter, Lewin told us how Campus got its start at a barbecue this past summer where he and three friends proposed a marriage of undergraduate business and literary interests to publish a magazine. They began gathering a directorate whose eclectic membership includes a physics graduate student, an English major, a pre-medical student, a French literature major, several aspiring lawyers, a fraternity president, a member of Dartmouth's divestment group, and a director of the Dartmouth Conservative Union. Since September, Lewin has been putting in 14-hour days for the magazine, and he claimed that the inexperienced staff has accomplished in five weeks what should have taken five months. The first issue should appear around Thanksgiving.

Just as Levitan hung up the phone, an advertising staff member dressed in a gray business suit climbed into the office through the double glass doors. He sat on the table, and Levitan offered some comments: "Andy and I are really the 'Odd Couple' of the College. If we were trying to pick two people who could not work together, we would have picked each other." We asked the publishers what the main reason was for the successful founding of their magazine, and while Lewin, the humanist, stressed the ripe mood of campus literary people, and Levitan, the businessman, cited the accessibility of College administrators during the relaxed summer term, we exited the office by way of the glass doors, and left the two of them to figure it out.