My Stint at the LSU Daily Reveille

by Stephan Kinsella on April 20, 2025

As I’ve recounted in various biographical pieces, ¹ in college (LSU) I dabbled in writing letters to the editor to local newspapers and the student newspaper, and then columns for the LSU Daily Reveille as well The Wonderland Times, an underground student newspaper published briefly around that time. ²

As I mentioned in The Genesis of Estoppel: My Libertarian Rights Theory:

When I was younger I was interested both in STEM topics as well as philosophy, but had almost no views on political or economic topics. I was basically tabula rasa. Reading Ayn Rand in high school catapulted me into deeper interest in philosophy, political theory, economics. I ended up going to LSU and studying electrical engineering (started in 1983), but I was also devouring this other kind of material “on the side.” I started getting the itch to have conversations or interactions on these topics with others, but it was hard to find anyone to talk about them with. Frustrating. You can’t find engineering students who care about this stuff. And there was no Internet back then. This itch is probably one reason I eventually gravitated towards law school. I gradually realized I would not be satisfied being a practicing engineer. I liked using normative and verbal and legal type reasoning and argumentation too much, plus the scholarship opportunities a law career can offer. I liked writing. Engineering would not have suited me—it would have been too stultifying and boring.

In any case, in college I occasionally attended some artsy things, like Free Speech Alley, a couple of Libertarian Party meetings, some plays, etc., but it was always a dud. Even though I liked math and the sciences and found electrical engineering interesting and challenging, I was sort of a frustrated wanna-be humanities type.

For a while I was heavily involved with local versions or chapters of the national Skeptics’/Secularist groups like CSICOP. I finally quit them out of frustration (and boredom). ³ I played D&D once or twice with friends, but didn’t get it. Yawn. I went to arthouse movies with English major friends and read their draft plays. But it was always short-lived, a strain. It should go without saying that I find all this youthful probing and searching a bit embarrassing now, but hey, what the hell. It’s life.

After getting tired of wasting my time on such pursuits, being a bore to friends clearly not interested in ideas, and so on, I started writing letters to the editor to the local newspaper and the LSU student newspaper, The Daily Reveille. I eventually persuaded some editors at the Reveille to let me be an occasional guest columnist, and also wrote some pieces for The Wonderland Times, ⁴ an underground student newspaper. I published a few while I was in grad school pursuing my MSEE and then later as a law student (from about 1987 to 1991). I remember I would have to walk to the offices of the Reveille, find a terminal, and type my entire article in by hand from my own printed copy (which I had typed on my home computer, a Franklin Ace Apple II+ clone—but I knew of no easy way to transfer the files from my computer to theirs—no thumb drives, email, etc.), adding formatting codes and editing it myself. This was 1988 or so. Times were very primitive, technologically. No laptops in schools, yet, yada yada. I wrote now-embarrassing columns defending Israel, ⁵ opposing minimum wage, ⁶ arguing for a national sales tax, ⁷ the voucher system— ⁸ all on sort of Milton Friedman/Randian type grounds. This minarchist/moderate phase was pretty temporary, however, since I was on the cusp of shifting more into hard-core Rothbardian-style anarchist libertarianism.