The DePauw

Celebrating its 150th birthday April 7, 2002, The DePauw can trace its beginnings to the Asbury Notes, a student-faculty collaborative work begun in 1852. That paper was named for Francis Asbury, Methodist bishop and original namesake of the University.

Asbury Notes was edited by members of the faculty, John Wheeler and Joseph Tingley, and included a "student department" section for student writings. It lasted just two years and it was replaced 12 years later by the Asbury Review, 1866-1876. No University publication existed during the Civil War years.

Then in 1878 the Asbury Monthly, a literary paper, began publishing poetry and essays. It changed its name to the DePauw Monthly when Indiana Asbury became DePauw University in 1884. It ceased publication in 1888.

A pair of competing news publications existed during the next few years. The Bema and the DePauw Record were published by different groups of fraternities. They merged in 1893 to form the DePauw Weekly.

When Charles Beard, 1898, later a noted historian and political scientist, became editor in 1897, he changed the name of the paper to the Palladium. It retained this name until 1904, when it became simply The DePauw, the first time the current name was used.

An ambitious effort was undertaken in writing the paper as the DePauw Daily from 1907-20. This publication made DePauw the smallest college in the country with a daily newspaper, but the strain of continuous deadlines took its toll. The student staff renamed it The DePauw and reduced its publication frequency to the current semi-weekly with the Sept. 28, 1920 issue.

The DePauw changed its look several times over the next eight decades and switched to computer-generated production in 1988. Beginning in 1935, the paper and its sister publication, the annual Mirage, shared their own building between Asbury Hall and the Roy O. West Library, but the publications abandoned it following the construction of the Eugene S. Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media in 1991.