From our “Careful What You Ask For” Department,
comes this:
One honoree at last week's employee recognition
luncheon was perhaps a little too flippant in responding to
the invitation. Eschewing the menu offering of
Chicken Florentine for “just a burger and fries,” he watched as
his tablemates tucked into chef Will Roy's specialty. When
his plate came, it was precisely what he ordered … in
a Burger King bag.
Thanks to George Schiller and friends for meeting
our dietary requirements.
Senior Stephanie Maychack scored seven goals and
10 points while sophomore goaltender Liz Soto was
forced to make just five saves as Union won the
Upstate Collegiate Athletic Association women's lacrosse
championship by defeating the University of Rochester, 17-5,
last Friday on Frank Bailey Field.
The Dutchwomen finish the regular season with an
overall 13-1 (8-0 UCAA) and take the league championship
and automatic berth in the NCAA tournament. Seeding
takes place on Sunday.
Rochester fell to 11-2 overall and 5-2 in the league.
“These women should be very proud of their
accomplishments,” said fifth-year head coach Linda Bevelander,
who has led the Dutchwomen to an overall record 53-26,
two UCAA titles, two NCAA berths, and three
NYSWCAA postseason tournaments, including the program's
only state championship (2000).
Union last participated in the NCAA tournament in 1999.
Dangerous Liaisons set for Yulman Theater, Union College
Schenectady,
N.Y. – Union College's Yulman Theater presents Dangerous Liaisons by Christopher Hampton, directed by Joanne
Yarrow, through November 4.
The play, set just prior to
the French Revolution, is about sex as a strategic battle of conquests. It is
based on the 1782 Choderlos de Laclos novel Les
Liaisons Dangereuses. The play is not recommended for children.
Cast and crew are comprised
of Union College students.
Performances are Oct. 25
through 27, at 8 p.m.; Oct. 28th at 2 p.m.; Nov. 1 through 3 at 8
p.m.; and Nov. 4 at 2 p.m.
Tickets are $5 for members
of the Union College community; $7 for the public. Parking for the Yulman
Theater is located nearby in the lot at the corner of Nott Street and Seward
Place.
For more information, call
the Yulman Theater box office at 388-6545.
It's 3 a.m. on a Wednesday and Katrina Tentor, editor in chief of Concordiensis, has only a few hours left before this week's edition goes to press.
Staring at one last blank page, she asks herself the same question countless editors have asked, “How am I going to fill this?”
Faced with a readership
that has high expectations, student writers who can be unreliable, and limited exposure to what is considered correct journalism, Katrina deals with the obstacles week after week because of her unconditional dedication.
“I am proud to say that I'm
the editor in chief of a paper that has been the main political impact on this campus since 1877,” she says, adding, “Sometimes I am more proud than other weeks. Concordy is not merely my extracurricular activity. It consumes every minute of my life on this campus in one way or another.”
Her staff consists of a handful of students who, she says, strive to “make the most
professional paper with the resources we have.” Unfortunately, all too often the campus community forgets about the obstacles the staff faces on a regular basis. On each Tuesday evening, for example, editors wait for their often unreliable writers to e-mail their articles. By the end of the night, Katrina simply tries “to cover bits and pieces instead of one major thing.”
Concordiensis is basically a do-it-yourself operation. It operates independently of the administration and of student activities, except for its budget. Its student writers “float in and out of the office all the time,” as the editor puts it. The College offers no journalism courses or training, and the newspaper's only advisor is a full-time faculty member in the Classics Department.
In most cases, writers are introduced to Concordiensis by word of mouth from current writers, or editors will “drag in their friends.” Turnover is high, and the paper constantly depends upon new writers with fresh motivation, backed by a new string of cartoonists, editors, and layout editors behind them. Fine lines have to be walked. As Katrina notes, “You don't want people to quit, so while the staff tries to adhere to standards of
professionalism, it also must placate crucially-needed but inexperienced writers.”
Still, despite all the handicaps, the students who produce Concordiensis recognize that they have an important role
in depicting the political,
cultural, and social changes on campus.
But on this Wednesday
morning, there is the practical problem of an empty page.
So Katrina looks around the office, desperately searching for that last page filler. Finally she decides to create an advertisement on her own, an insider's page understandable to herself and maybe a handful of others. The spontaneous creativity such as this, which stems from these late hours, does preserve the paper's
collegiate flair after all.
Since November, 1877, the Concordiensis has been
the principal newspaper of Union.
The thirteenth oldest student newspaper in the United States, the Concordiensis took as its name
a newly-coined (probably by a student) Latin adjective meaning “of or pertaining to union.”
Since we cannot reprint the thousands of issues that have appeared over the past 125 years, we
are happy to offer the following sampling. For those who would like to see more, every issue of the Concordy is kept in the College's Special Collections
in Schaffer Library.
May 1890
From journal to newspaper
The Concordiensis began as a monthly, about eight inches by eleven. Its first editorial set a lofty tone: “It is our intention to make the Concordiensis such a paper that no Alumnus of Union will be willing to forego it….” But they would have to pay for the privilege-one dollar per year, in advance.
In 1916, the Concordiensis changed from a magazine format to a four-column tabloid. The editors explained that the old style was “clumsy, inefficient, old-fashioned,” and that the change meant that readers would no longer have to “burrow endlessly through little sheets of paper” to get the news.
The Concordy became biweekly in 1890-91 and went to three times a week with the format change in 1916. Forced to suspend publication in September 1918 because of World War I, the paper resumed twice-a-week publication in 1919. That schedule continued until February 1942, when another war compelled the paper to become a weekly again. After the war, the Concordiensis increased to six or eight pages in 1948-49. In 1982, it expanded to twenty-four pages, and it has generally remained at the twenty or twenty-four page level.
Early issues were sometimes illustrated with engravings. Although photographs first appeared in May 1890, they were not used frequently until about 1894. Action news photographs were introduced in 1948-49, and color photography appeared in January 1965.
January 1911
We can make money?
The Concordiensis contained advertising from its first issue, and by the end of 1880-81, the paper showed a profit. The presence of a real income was so heady that at the end of 1886-87, the business manager used the profits to buy himself and each of the senior editors “a beautiful gold headed ebony cane.” Soon, however, business managers simply kept the profits, a practice that, as one might expect, led to abuses. In 1910-11, when profits were estimated to exceed $500 a year, the Concordiensis editors complained that the business manager, who controlled the size and number of issues, starved the editorial department of space in order to maximize his own profits, and that past managers had sometimes cheated advertisers and left printers' bills unpaid.
The Student Publications Board was established in 1910 to oversee the Concordiensis and other publications. From then until the Student Council abolished the system in 1948, senior editors and business managers shared in profits.
October 8, 1948
Sports
Sports has always been a big item. The editors devoted about nine pages to the 1913 football game with Hamilton, and on the same occasion in 1924 the paper issued a special supplement. Early sports writing was sometimes very frank, with such headlines as “Union loses again,” or “Union wins poorly played game,” but sometimes excessively discreet, as when the fact that Union had lost the Williams game, and by a score of 130-0, was buried at the end of the story. Today's sports stories often are written by team members, which leads to enthusiasm if not objectivity.
Help wanted
Until 1885, editors were elected by the classes. From the spring of 1885, the editor-in-chief was selected by the Board of Editors, which continued to be elected by the classes. In the fall of 1892, the paper was made editorially self-perpetuating; only the business manager was elected (by the sophomore class), while the other editors were chosen in competitions judged by the two senior editors and a faculty member. After 1911 the newly-created Publications Board chose the Concordiensis board on recommendation of the editor-in-chief and the business manager.
In January 1967 the Student Council returned the selection of editors to the paper itself, instituting the system of selecting editors which has essentially been used since: the editor is elected by the entire staff of the paper.
One thing that has not changed over the years is the need for good writers. When the paper became a tabloid in 1916, the editors wrote that what they were doing “is probably the most practical and useful activity at Union. It needs a lot of work, and a lot of workers. It needs interest,…and that means you.” A recent Concordiensis tried a less-admonishing approach: “You know how sometimes it seems like winter term drags on forever? You get really bored because it's too cold to go outside. Then why don't you write for features?”
A good many Concordiensis editors have become professional journalists, starting with J.F. Greene, who edited the first two issues and then left to join the staff of the Amsterdam Recorder. On the other hand, the two most successful journalists among Union's twentieth century alumni, Mark Watson '08 (Pulitzer-Prize winning military writer for the Baltimore Sun) and Howard Simons '51 (managing editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era), never served as editors of the Concordiensis.
October 14, 1960
Broadening content
The first Concordiensis 125 years ago carried literary contributions, alumni news, a little bit of College news, and some items about Union University (that first issue, in fact, said it was published by the students of Union University). Today, Concordy carries Union College, national, and international news and features of interest to students. The changes, however, were not simple and direct. Some came because editors wanted to place a distinctive stamp on the publication. But many came because of external circumstances. A journal for the alumni (now the Union College magazine) began in 1911; Union University never did become unified, thus narrowing the audience for the paper; and such events as two world wars and the Vietnam War induced most students to take more interest in events beyond the campus. This was not always the case, of course; the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 was mentioned only in a gossip column.
Early issues contained large quantities of general essays, fiction, and poetry.
By the 1950s, national issues were getting extensive coverage. In 1951-52, the Concordiensis gave much attention to the Eisenhower-Stevenson presidential election. By 1959-60 the paper was carrying regular news of integration battles and supporting the civil rights movement editorially. In February 1961, the paper ran an article on racial discrimination in Schenectady, probably the first investigative article it had run on the community.
In early 1968, the Concordiensis published a three-part article on the modern history of Vietnam. In 1969-70 and 1970-71, there was a great deal of news of student protests of the Vietnam War, and in 1975 the Concordiensis first published selections from the campus police blotter.
Several local features began in the mid-'70s: classified ads in January 1976, “personals” in 1976-77, and restaurant reviews in 1977-78. By early 1974, the Concordiensis regularly devoted a two-page spread to the arts. The 1980s saw a great increase in the number of news service articles and features, such as a financial column, Jeane Dixon's horoscope column, and a business section.
April 29, 1965
Humor, sophmore and otherwise
The first joke issue, comprising a separate page of the paper with its own masthead, appeared on March 2, 1923. Printed on pink paper, it was composed of humorous articles nearly all written by the girlfriends of members of the editorial staff. Prom and April Fool issues became quite common, sometimes appearing three times a year. The first parody of another publication appeared in May, 1925; it lampooned one of Schenectady's daily newspapers.
In April 1965 the Concordiensis parody of the Skidmore News was distributed at Skidmore a few hours in advance of the real issue. From May 1981 onward, the Concordiensis has published
a humor section, under the masthead “Distordiensis,” in the final issue of each year.
In November 1981 two members of the WRUC staff turned the tables, publishing
a “counterfeit” issue of the paper. Although the lampoon was relatively mild, it was greeted with a total lack of humor by the Concordiensis (“offended and outraged”), by the Student Forum, and by the administration; with the Dean of Students' permission, issues were “impounded.”
November 12, 1981
You can't say that
Over the years, most of the cries of “censorship” that came from the Concordiensis offices were aimed at student government and not at the administration. In January 1937, for example, the Student Council, which had been undergoing heavy criticism from the paper, voted to set up a “student board of control to take responsibility with the editor and aid in the formulation of all editorial policy.” The Student Body meeting rejected the idea.
Clashes between the Concordiensis and the Student Council in 1960-61 culminated in a dramatic repudiation by the student body of student government interference with the paper. The editors had been very critical of the Student Council on the issue of fraternity discrimination. The council retaliated by suspending the Concordiensis, but it quickly became clear that the council had misread the feeling of that community. Confronted with a petition in support of the paper signed by a large majority of the student body, the Student Council backed down. The sight of students, rather than administrators, banning a student newspaper made national news.
In 1982 the Concordiensis printed a draft of a confidential report of the Conduct Committee on a large-scale campus fight which had some racial aspects. The report quoted testimony given under a guarantee of confidentiality. When the Student Affairs Council dismissed charges against the editor-in-chief, saying there was lack of evidence, the Student Forum, at the urging of the Dean of Students, removed him from office. The managing editor resigned in protest.
