In this editor’s humble opinion, The Marquis has lost its edge over the years.
––but before you cue the world’s smallest violin, I would insist that you to take a look through the archive. Lafayette’s Special Collections has electronic records of The Marquis, going all the way back to its first edition in 1947.
You’ll be shocked by the savagery of their editorial cartoons, charmed by full page advertisements for filterless Camel cigarettes, and impressed by elaborate pre-digital-era page design. Whether you read Burt Shorr’s compendious essay documenting the jaw-dropping antics of the “Lafayette Underground” in the Spring Issue of 1950 (in 1913 they stole a cadaver from the biology department––in 1914 the entire sophomore class was suspended for hazing), or look through Michael Martineau’s unapologetically pretentious commentary on Picasso in the Spring Issue of 1964 (wherein Martineau also thought it necessary to run a complete reprinting of Rilke’s Duino Elegies), I think you’ll find yourself holding onto some amount of romanticism for the days when Lafayette had a student body so dedicated to this meagre publication.
It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that the virulent elitism and sexism in many of The Marquis’s early volumes has no place on Lafayette’s campus, and least of all in the community around this publication’s contemporary iterations. Nevertheless, a look through the archive is always instructive: it helps us to see the possibilities of the present moment.
But as early as 1975––as is made clear in a hilariously bitter foreword written by the editors––student interest was waning, and support from student government was scant. (That same foreword mentions that The Lafayette had published a “scathing appraisal” of the magazine. … I would be bitter too.)
Nevertheless, four decades later, The Marquis has survived, and each and every year we’ve managed to publish a volume of student art and writing. To echo the message of the editors in 1975, this publication will only ever be what the student body makes of it. It is incumbent upon every member of the Lafayette community who fancies themself a devotee of arts and/or letters to see to it that this magazine is all that it can be.