The Phillipian

The Phillipian is the student-run weekly newspaper of the American preparatory school of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It covers school news including controversies, campus events, sports, faculty appointments, graduations, and academic programs, and it serves as a training ground for students to learn about journalism.[1] Many of its student contributors have gone on to careers in journalism and the media. The publication aims to foster a literary and journalistic spirit among its student contributors.[1] It is regarded as the second-oldest continuously published paper [1] and it is in its 142th year of continuous publication.[2] It publishes a digital version as well as archives of past papers, and publishes on various social media platforms. The paper edition is printed weekly during the school year, and there is a summer edition as well. The publication gets revenue from an endowment fund as well as advertising revenues from local businesses, and students run the paper as a business.[3] While the paper has faculty advisers, all editorial decisions are made by student editors, and it is editorially independent from the academy's administration.[3] In 2017 the printed version is 12–16 pages long and has five regular sections: news, commentary, sports, arts and features, and is distributed every Friday.

The Phillipian
Phillips Academy
Veritas Super Omnia
TypeWeekly newspaper
FormatBroadsheet
FoundedSeptember 1, 1857 (1857-09-01)
LanguageEnglish
HeadquartersAndover, MA
Websitephillipian.net
Free online archivesarchives.phillipian.net

History

Beginnings
This image is believed to show the first publication of a high school student newspaper in the United States, dated July 28, 1857.

The first edition of The Phillipian was published on July 28, 1857, making it the oldest preparatory school newspaper in America.[1] The initial motto was Justitia fiat ruat caelum, a Latin phrase meaning "Let justice be done though the heavens fall"; later the motto became Veritas super omnia or "Truth above all".

In the decades after 1857, there is no evidence of publication until October 19, 1878, when The Phillipian began regular publication,[4] making it the second-oldest continuously published preparatory school paper.[5][6] The first masthead listed editor-in-chief Edward S. Beach and nine associates.[7]

In the 1880s, the paper covered issues such as disputes between students and the town of Andover, usually siding with the students, and covered the ongoing rivalry with Exeter and its paper.[8] It described initiation rites of Andover's secret societies:

Pomp's Pond was the site of some initiation rites into secret societies.

He was first ordered to provide a supper for the society at his rooms... at twelve o'clock, he was sent out on the campus behind the Academy to wait for what might follow. At about one o'clock he was seized by his fellows, blindfolded, and ridden on a rail down to Pomp's Pond, those accompanying him rattling empty bottles all the time to give the effect of clanking chains. After arriving at the pond, he was buried in a grave up to his head, and then baptized with an abominable mixture of mucilage and ginger ale, this operation closing the ceremonies.

— Claude Moore Feuss, 1917 (describing events of 1884)[9]

Andover's secret societies had become recognized by the school, as the paper reported in 1884.[10]

Early years
Coverage of the Andover-Exeter sports rivalry in 1888.

Sports coverage was important in these early years, and reporting was generally skewed in Andover's favor. Claude Moore Feuss, a former head of School (then called headmaster) who published a history of the academy, described the Phillipian's coverage of rival teams as "ungenerous to opponents".[11] The paper described the pitching of student baseball pitcher Alfred Stearns as follows:

Stearns, under the pressure of the most continued yelling, hooting, rattle-shaking, and every conceivable annoyance of Exeter's representatives, pitched a wonderful game.

— Claude Moore Feuss[11]

Stearns was a Phillipian editor who later became headmaster.[12] In 1885, an editorial advocated against hiring a local professional baseball pitcher to help Andover's baseball team win against the town; it was a matter of "school honesty and honor", wrote the student.[13] The paper sometimes urged students to have greater participation in sports:

Every student in an academy like this should be interested in athletic sports. The very scholarly student often makes the excuse that he don't (sic) understand the games, and really has not time for them. And so the physical sports are left to a certain class who, while they are perfectly willing to incur all the expense, are obliged too frequently to resort to the subscription list or hat-passing.

— Claude Feuss[14][15]
The 1883 Andover football squad

The Phillipian touted the scholarship of the school's athletes, reporting that athletics and scholarship were not mutually antagonistic as had been commonly thought, but that "football is an intellectual game, not merely a test of physical strength, and that the active scholarship rule is favorable not only to scholarship, but also to football success."[16]

Historical subscription prices Selected years
Year Frequency Price per year Notes
1878 Biweekly $1.00 [1]
1885 Weekly $1.75 [1]
1887 Twice weekly $2.50
1913 $.05/issue
2017 Weekly Free

Twentieth century
A section of the front page in 1913 – Cost? Five cents

The paper's length was typically four pages, although at one point it expanded to eight pages, but was scaled back.[17] In the early 1900s, page size was increased.[17] From 1907 to 1917, a committee of faculty members supervised the publication nominally, by approving the selection of student editors.[17]

In 1974, following the merger of Abbot Academy and Phillips Academy, the paper's offices were located at Evans Hall.[18] One privilege of working on The Phillipian during those days was being allowed to stay out late on Wednesday nights:[18]

Our secret was The Phillipian, the student newspaper, which came out weekly. You could say that working on the school paper was for nerds, but we loved it for a lot of reasons. One of them was that on Wednesday nights when we were putting out the paper, we could stay in the newspaper offices in the basement of Evans Hall all night if we needed to. With girls.

— report in Newsweek magazine,2010[18]
Then-senior Dana Delany wrote an op-ed in 1974[19] about her experience of being a one-year student during the school's first year of co-education; she went on to a career in acting.

Endowment Campaign

In 2013, The Phillipian launched a campaign to establish an endowment to stabilize the publication's finances. The one-year campaign was spearheaded by twenty-one Phillipian alumni including journalist Gary Lee and Microsoft intellectual property counsel Thomas Rubin.[20] More than six hundred contributors raised $654,000.[3] The mission was to secure financial independence of the paper. In 2015, The Phillipian discontinued on-campus paid subscriptions and publishes to students and faculty without charge.

A forum for controversy

The publication often allows students to air their views in a public forum. Editorials, op-ed pieces, and letters to the editor have sometimes stirred campus-wide debate.

In 2003, a student and Phillipian columnist criticized the school for its lack of appropriate mental health services, after she had difficulty during her Andover years of adjusting to a romantic breakup.[21] She asserted that the school's negative attitude towards students who needed counseling might discourage students from seeking help.[21] In 2013, a letter to the editor expressed concern regarding gender equity; the writer complained that in a school in which over half of the faculty were women, that since 1973, women were chosen to be school president only four times.[22] The writer added that from 1973 to 2013, there were only nine female editors of The Phillipian as opposed to thirty-three male editors.[22][23] In 2015, male athletes wrote a letter to the editor complaining how the male athlete sports-oriented culture was an indirect cause of sexism and led to an unbalanced "hook-up culture" at the school.[24]

Sometimes refusing to publish a point of view has caused controversy. For example, Marie Sapienza claimed that her English teacher had fondled her when she had been a 15-year-old at the school; later, when she was in college, she tried to publish a letter in the paper about the alleged assault, but was rebuffed.[25]

Since The Phillipian publishes its archives, it has been a source of public information regarding disputes in the larger political sphere. For example, the paper was a source of news about whether Republican politician Jeb Bush had been a socialist during his student years at Andover.[26]

The publishing process

Generally each springtime, outgoing student editors choose the next batch of editors for the following year. Editorial meetings take place in a basement room in Morse Hall.[27] According to a report in Town & Country magazine, there is no censorship of The Phillipian.[27] While there may be no formal censorship, there have been some rules and restrictions; for example, a report in 2011 said that student editors were discouraged from contacting the school's trustees, and that trustees were asked by the administration not to speak to student reporters.[28] In 2017, the paper has a policy of censoring out the names of student writers, possibly as a way of shielding their identities on the Internet. At editorial meetings, there are two faculty advisers who critique last week's paper and offer suggestions for improvement.[27] Academy instructor Thomas T. Lyons, who believed that "teachers shouldn't be dull", served as an adviser for several decades in the latter half of the twentieth century.[29] In addition, The Phillipian serves as a reference for the school. It publishes an annual survey of students and student life.[27]

Social aspects

The Phillipian is in many respects a social club and a way for students to form lifelong friendships. Grace Tully, a contributor who graduated in 2014, described her experience at the paper as being one of passionate sleepless nights of writing and serving as a "second home":

...we are inseparable. ... we all love what we stand for ... the Phillipian led me to mentors and role models ... the basement of Morse is becoming a second home ... we are passionate... transform us into aspiring journalists, loving every new sleepless night ... we dedicate all of our time, some of our health, and most our sanity to the well-being of that paper ... 60 sleepless hours, the countless coffee stains and cigarettes strewn across my bedroom floor...

— Grace Tully, 2014, [30]

The Phillipian sponsors an annual bus trip to New York City for student contributors to visit the New York Times, ABC News, and other media-related venues.

Honors and awards
  • 2012 National Scholastic Press Association Newspaper Pacemaker Award[31]
  • 2015 Kailash Sundaram, The Price of an Andover Education: Three Students’ Difficult Transitions to Andover[32]
  • 2015 Opinion: David Shin, On Discussions and Diversity[32]
  • 2015 Reporter of the Year: Kailash Sundaram, The Price of an Andover Education: Three Students’ Difficult Transitions to Andover[32]
  • 2015 Design Infographic: Jamie Chen[32]

Notable alumni
Jonathan Dee.
Seth Moulton.

Phillipian writers have had careers in publications including The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker and Time.

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gollark: I'm uploading this kode to hackinate the discord and virtually backtrace your IPs so I can DDOS Visual Basic.
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See also

References
  1. Frank Decker and Al Krass, March 11, 1954, The Phillipian, Investigators Find That Phillipian Is 96, Years Old: Discovery Shows Phillipian is 96 Years Old Retrieved December 10, 2017
  2. Technical note: Phillips Exeter's weekly, The Exonian, was published half a year before the Phillipian began continuous publication, on April 6, 1878, making The Exonian the oldest continuously-published preparatory newspaper in the United States.
  3. Staff reporters, The Phillipian, 2015, The Phillipian Concludes Endowment Campaign, Retrieved December 10, 2017, "...The paper’s independence has always been guaranteed by precedent, by the school respecting that the paper is uncensored and unsupervised, and by the paper’s ability to support itself as a business. ... endowment will secure the future of that independence ... a truly free press is an extraordinary place ...."
  4. [archives.phillipian.net/explore.php Phillipian archives]
  5. Note: Exeter's The Exonian is the oldest continuously published preparatory school paper.
  6. Note: Despite being the second published issue of The Phillipian, this issue was also labeled as Volume 1, Number 1; as a result, there are two unique Volume 1, Number 1 issues of The Phillipian.
  7. Phillipian archives
  8. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017
  9. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, see page 443
  10. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 442
  11. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 458
  12. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 505
  13. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 457
  14. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 475
  15. Axel Bundgaard, Syracuse University Press, 2005, Book title: Muscle and Manliness: The Rise of Sport in American Boarding Schools, p. 44
  16. Texas School Journal, Texas Educational Journal Publishing Company, 1898, Volumes 16-17, Texas School Journal, p. 242
  17. Claude Moore Fuess, Houghton Mifflin, 1917, 547 pages, An Old New England School: A History of Phillips Academy Andover, Retrieved December 10, 2017, p. 439
  18. Staff editors, January 31, 2010, Newsweek, How I (sort of) Met J.D. Salinger in 1974, Retrieved December 11, 2017, "....."
  19. "The Phillipian Archives: 1974-05-30" (PDF). archives.phillipian.net. 1974-05-30. Retrieved 23 September 2018.
  20. [endowment.phillipian.net Phillipian endowment]
  21. Michael Winerip, July 9, 2003, The New York Times, ON EDUCATION; Counseling at Phillips, And Its Consequences, Retrieved December 13, 2017, "...My boyfriend and I declared each other as our first loves, she wrote in one of her final columns for The Phillipian. We had a rocky relationship, ... once she was sure to graduate, Cathy told her story in a three-part series in The Phillipian. She wrote that the way the school had treated her would discourage students who needed help from seeking counseling... School officials wrote letters to The Phillipian criticizing Cathy's series,..."
  22. Katharine Q. Seelye, April 11, 2013, The New York Times, School Vote Stirs Debate on Girls as Leaders, Retrieved December 10, 2017, "...The paucity of girls in high-profile positions ... leaves younger students with few role models and discourages them from even trying for the top...."
  23. Katherine Schulten, April 17, 2013, The New York Times, Why Aren’t There More Girls in Leadership Roles?, Retrieved December 11, 2017, "... several weeks ago in a letter to the student newspaper, The Phillipian, ... set off a raging debate that engulfed the campus..."
  24. Julie Sprankles, July 12, 2017, She Knows magazine, "15 Male Athletes Who Are Proactively Fighting for Gender Equality", Retrieved December 11, 2017, "...the male athletes at this elite boarding school penned an unprecedented Letter to the Editor of the school newspaper, the Phillipian. ..."
  25. Bill Kirk, August 2017, Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, "Lawyer: Phillips report on sex abuse 'window-dressing'" Garabedian claims report is 'tip of the iceberg' of abuse cases], Retrieved December 11, 2017,"... Sapienza tried to report the alleged assault but was rebuffed..."
  26. May 28, 2015, Andrew Kaczynski, Christopher Massie, Buzzfeed, "Was Jeb Bush A Socialist At Andover? One Student Newspaper Article Says He Was. But some students from the era say it was probably a joke that Bush was in such a club. A prep school mystery.", Retrieved December 11, 2017, "...According to Andover's ... The Phillipian, Jeb Bush once attempted to get his political group "the Socialist Anti-Nationalist Party" into the Andover Student Political Union ... a sarcastic joke..."
  27. RICHARD MCGILL MURPHY, July 7, 2015, Town and Country Magazine, How John Palfrey Is Bringing America's Most Elite Boarding School Into the Digital Age: For centuries Andover was considered the ne plus ultra of elitist, insular boarding schools. Now, with a young iconoclast at the helm, it has become an institution that would shock its 18th-century founders., Retrieved December 11, 2017, "...There is no censorship at Andover, so Phillipian editors are free to print what they like....two faculty advisers attend editorial meetings, where they critique the most recent edition of the paper ... Rates of drinking, drugging, and sexual activity seem to track the general teenage population, according to the annual student survey published in the Phillipian...."
  28. Jack Dickey, August 12, 2011, Deadspin, The Hidden Message Of That Andover Rap Video, Retrieved December 14, 2017, "... When I worked at The Phillipian, the director of communications decreed that we were not allowed to contact trustees, even though some had listed numbers and would answer questions from reporters. Trustees were later told not to speak to us. ..."
  29. Boston Globe, November 11, 2012, Thomas T. Lyons, 78; memorable history teacher at Phillips Academy, Retrieved December 10, 2017, "...Mr. Lyons, who spent 36 years at Phillips Academy as a teacher, coach, and adviser to the student newspaper, The Phillipian,..."
  30. Grace Tully, May 30, 2014, Romantic Misanthropy (journal), "Driving Me Crazy and Keeping Me Sane: My Time on VII So Far", Retrieved December 14, 2017
  31. Student Press Archived 2015-05-11 at the Wayback Machine
  32. http://programs.thecrimson.com/awards/
  33. Robert P. Moncreiff, Yale University Press, Oct 1, 2008, Book title: Bart Giamatti: A Profile, p. 15
  34. JONATHAN MAHLER and RAVI SOMAIYA, December 7, 2014, The New York Times, Revolt at the New New Republic, Retrieved December 11, 2017, "... Mr. Hughes left Facebook in 2007 ...at Andover, he was news director of The Phillipian...."
  35. MICHAEL KRUSE, July 28, 2017, Politico, Generals Love Him. Top Democrats Despise Him. Can He Be President Anyway? Seth Moulton, the junior congressman from Massachusetts, has a war record that appeals to voters and makes opponents nervous, Retrieved December 11, 2017, "...Andover, where the motto is non sibi, or not for self, Moulton was one of two sports editors for the weekly student newspaper, the Phillipian. He worked late on nights before it went to print, when his peers were ready to go study or sleep..."
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