Michigan’s Oldest College Newspaper?

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The Opinion of the Collegian Editorial Staff

Below is a letter to the editor The Collegian’s editorial board sent to Kalamazoo College’s student newspaper, the Index:

The Index published a column on Jan. 29 taking issue with The Collegian’s claim as Michigan’s oldest college newspaper. Katie Schmitz, the column’s author, claims that the Index is, in fact, an older newspaper than The Collegian.

The Collegian’s editorial board takes issue with several thing Ms. Schmitz wrote in the article, the misspelling of our newspaper’s name and her apparent disdain for our relative anonymity being but minor grievances.

It is her general thesis – that The Collegian is not the oldest college newspaper in Michigan and, therefore, that our masthead tells a lie – that we find most troubling. The Collegian’s history dates back to Thursday, Oct. 10, 1878. This day marks the first publication of the Hillsdale Herald, a weekly broadsheet that served as the college’s sole newspaper for 15 years. The college started The Collegian in 1893 and the two papers merged to become the Collegian-Herald in 1896. Eventually the paper dropped the Herald and became simply The Collegian.

It is true that the Index was first published some 11 months prior to the Herald’s inaugural issue. It is also true, however, that the Index did not begin as a newspaper, but instead as a quarterly publication that contained mostly student-written literary efforts. By the early 20th century, the Index had, it appears, evolved into a book more akin to our own prose and poetry publication, the Tower Light. Only in 1916 did the Index become a weekly newspaper.

The Collegian’s masthead has claimed to be “Michigan’s Oldest College Newspaper” since Oct. 19, 1949. Because the boast claims our status as “newspaper,” as opposed to “publication,” we will leave it alone in the masthead, with a clean collective conscience, until proven otherwise. As the Index was not a newspaper for the first 40 years of its existence, it does not hold a claim to our title.

We thank Ms. Schmitz for her interest in The Collegian’s history, and wish her the best of luck in her future journalism endeavors.

 

Cordially,

The Collegian editorial board