In November 1875, the Literary Union of Wheaton College published the first issue of the College Record, Wheaton’s student newspaper. Over the next 150 years, the Record became both a laboratory for student writing and journalism and a living chronicle of campus life. Its pages have documented student activities, campus developments, educational changes, social movements and conflicts, political campaigns, visiting speakers, chapels and mission work, theological debates, faculty projects, and countless other moments that trace the evolving history of Wheaton College.

Wheaton Archives & Special Collections holds only scattered records for the first twenty years of the paper’s publication. Among these, the earliest surviving issue of the Record dates from June 1876. Although the inaugural issue of the Record is lost to history, the June 1876 editorial provides a helpful update on the paper’s first eight months, including plans for an enlargement of the paper from eight to sixteen pages. To fill this new space, the editors appealed directly to the student body, urging Wheaton students to contribute writing:

Students write for your paper. Don’t say you haven’t time to write because you are so pressed with your studies, but take a few moments each day to write and you will soon find you are the gainer by it. Of what value will your education be to you unless you learn to apply what you learn? It may, indeed, be some satisfaction to you to know that you have a college education, but certainly it will be of very little benefit to others if you know not how to use it. And in our opinion, there is no better way of putting to practical use the knowledge we have gained than by writing.

Let us, then, improve the opportunities given to us, and thus be enabled to benefit ourselves and our fellows. A college paper furnishes one of the means of improvement, and it is to be hoped that the students in future will improve the advantages thus offered to them more than they have in the past.

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