The Spire

Ian Sykes ‘28

Opinions Editor

Hello my dear Spire readers! It is I, your favorite liberal agitator Ian Sykes, and I would like to present to our campus community a new publication named the Beaven Bulwark.

Named after its namesake building, Beaven Hall, home of the sociology and anthropology departments from which student activists like myself get so much support from, the Bulwark seeks a unique goal: to promote social justice through student voices. While our Spire has individual writers who write in pursuit of this goal, the purpose of the Spire is more to deliver news, as one might expect, than to promote social justice. The Spire’s main purpose is also to promote the free exchange of all ideas, both conservative and liberal. As such, while there is a space for conservatives in the Fenwick Review and a place for misfits in the Spire, there has been up to this point no dedicated space in the campus conversation for progressives to speak their minds in the name of social justice. Filling this void is why we started the Bulwark.

We intend for this publication to be an extension of the Student Social Justice Collective by eventually making it a recognized RSO at some point in the future. While we are not there yet, our first edition will be out in due time once our team has fully compiled our submissions and made it. Suffice to say, we want to cement the place of progressivism at Holy Cross, and we intend to do so with a grassroots approach grounded in argumentation and reason.

We have no big-name donors. We aren’t accepting faculty submissions. We have little to no precedent at Holy Cross. The sole purpose of our paper is to promote progressive student voices with a staunch commitment to social justice through and through, so if this interests you or you want to contribute to our next issue, look for our issues dotted around campus soon, or follow our Instagram at @hc_beaven_bulwark. We aren’t going anywhere, so consider joining us if you feel compelled to support the mission of this budding publication!

Personally, I will continue writing for the Spire — the Bulwark is meant to be an alternative, more than a replacement, for it and other student publications. We want to serve as an ideological counterweight that is expressly unafraid to say the unsaid, and to speak truth to power. Overall, the Bulwark will be more of a periodical than a newspaper, so it will publish considerably less, and it will have more of a dedicated academic approach with full-length essays, research pieces, academic op-eds, calls to activism, a community announcements section, and even poetry or contemporary art, rather than strictly written pieces. We want to diversify the campus dialogue, both in ideology and in medium, so if this interests you, pick up a copy!

As Frederick Douglass once said in 1857, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.” The Bulwark indeed recognizes that without struggle, there is no progress — and we think that social justice and political progress are goals that are worth the struggle. So look out for our first issue this week and the next to see what we mean, and if social justice rings out to you as a personal calling, consider joining our cause!

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock