The Danforth Dispatch, Washington University’s newest student-run publication dedicated to promoting opinions it considers to be unpopular with the University’s largely left-leaning culture, published its first online issue, Oct. 1.

The stated mission of the Danforth Dispatch is to “critique the radical ideologies dominating campus culture” by promoting critical analyses and ideological freedom. Articles from its first issue covered topics ranging from the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to circumcision as a means for men’s oppression.

Senior Jacob Ramer and juniors Matias Mayesh, Damian Servidio and Walter Treat came up with the idea for the Dispatch last spring, in a reaction to what Servidio described as a “uniformity of thought” on campus.

“It’s not so much that we disagree with the opinions that people have, but we don’t like the idea that [we have to] hear the same thing over and over again,” Servidio said. “And it gets kind of tiring after a while.”

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Over the summer, the students reached out for support from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting conservative thought on college campuses. Founded in the 1950s by prominent conservative thinker and founder of the National Review William F. Buckley Jr., the organization has built up a network of around 18 student publications on college campuses including the Brown Spectator, the Princeton Tory and the Dartmouth Review.

Certain publications such as the Princeton Tory or the Dartmouth Review are self-described conservative publications, while others such as the Stanford Review or the Middlebury Independent adopt a nonpartisan stance. The Danforth Dispatch plans to follow in the footsteps of the latter two publications, welcoming opinions from all ideological perspectives. Mayesh claims that although the Dispatch receives funding from an organization dedicated to promoting conservative thought, the ISI will exert no editorial influence on the paper.

“They [the ISI] sponsor our organization, but they have no editorial control over us at all,” Mayesh said. “We have full discretion over what happens and that’s really about it. They’ve helped us organize a website—that’s it.”

Mayesh pointed to editorials by ISI-funded publications in favor of defunding the police and electing Bernie Sanders as examples of perspectives that the Dispatch would be open to publishing in the future. In the present, the publication’s first issue featured a mix of conservative pieces and apolitical content, with no left wing perspectives included.

However, Mayesh welcomed leftist writers to join, pointing out that only one issue had been published so far, and that the Dispatch would welcome unconventional opinions from all sides of the aisle.

“Generally we really are willing to publish anything that is unconventional,” he said. “You know, if someone came up to us with a traditional Marxist interpretation of something going on in academia and it was interesting, and we didn’t see that before in some other kind of campus publication we’d publish it.”

When asked about the potential difficulty of finding left-wing writers for the Dispatch, Servidio was unconcerned.

“The fact of the matter is our rule is that we will publish unconventional opinions that we aren’t seeing a lot,” he said. “If society is such that all of the unconventional opinions are right-wing, that’s a problem for society to think about. It’s not a problem for us.”

According to Mayesh, the fact that the Dispatch is funded by a conservative organization and at the moment mostly populated by right-leaning members, should not dissuade writers from other parts of the political spectrum from joining.

“I am a conservative and yes, that’s true that I am the president of the college Republicans, but I fully acknowledged that and I’m not going to deny it,” Mayesh said. “So it’s not like I’m hiding from anybody… I’ve invited plenty of people to come write for us. And some of them have said, ‘no’, some of them out of fear, some of them just not wanting to be associated [with the publication]… I’ve made a concerted effort to invite people and I always will.”

For the upcoming semester, the editors of the Dispatch are planning to include more reported content, new opinions and potentially a print issue.

“We’re hoping since this first issue is out, we’ll get more people coming to us and having just a wider variety of opinions to choose from the published journal, next issues,” Treat said. “And then we’re hoping to get a paper issue out next semester.”