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Life on the Quads
A Centennial View of
the Student Experience at the
University of Chicago
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Maroon staff, 1956.

Chicago Maroon staff meeting, 1956. Photograph by William M. Rittse.

 

 

Cap and Gown, 1939

Cap and Gown, 1939. Edited by Philip Schnering (AB 1939), the 1939 Cap and Gown emphasized generous pictorial coverage of the year's theater, sports, and publications, as well as the campus lectures given by visiting notables such as Bertrand Russell, Walter Lippman, and Edward Benes, former president of Czechoslovakia.

The Student Voice

The Maroon and Cap and Gown
With the onset of World War Il, the Daily Maroon could not maintain the staff necessary for a daily newspaper. Even after merging staffs with Pulse, the last remaining student magazine, the Maroon was forced to drop its daily formal for the biweekly schedule it still retains.

Over the past century, the longevity and stature of the Maroon as a student publication has been matched only by the Cap and Gown. Established in 1895 as an annual in honor of the University's first graduating class, the Cap and Gown broke from the traditional yearbook format by creating separate sections for different University organizations, a style it retained for most of its issues. The Cap and Gown volumes were produced consistently until 1942, when a combination of the war and the sharply reduced student population led to a twelve-year hiatus in publication. Between 1953 and 1968 the Cap and Gown returned to its former annual status, and the yearbook has continued to be issued intermittently in recent years.

Other Student Publications
It took a little over a month for students to create the University's first literary publication, the University Arena. Unlike the University of Chicago Weekly, which blended news with literary issues, the staff chose to devote the University Arena entirely to the literary efforts of students. Unfortunately the monthly publication never made it past the third issue. The University Arena staff might have been consoled, however, to know that it opened the way for an extraordinary number of student publications. Although it was the first, it was by no means the last publication to enjoy only a brief existence. In the past one hundred years numerous student publications have focused on a wide range of topics from the serious and scholarly to the humorous and bawdy. Some magazines even managed to contain a little of each. But only a handful survived their infancy.


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