Purdue Exponent


The Purdue Exponent is an independent student newspaper that serves Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. It is published on Mondays and Thursdays during university semesters by the Purdue Student Publishing Foundation, and is Indiana's largest collegiate daily newspaper.
The Exponent employs seven full-time professionals, relying for most operations on a staff of approximately 80 students, though the university has no journalism school.
Exponent alumni have won six Pulitzers, five Emmys, two Peabodys, and two John Chancellors.

History

The Exponent's first edition was published on December 15, 1889. It was a daily paper from 1906 to 2016. In 2017, it switched to a twice-weekly printing schedule. The Web edition was started in 1996. It was the first college newspaper in the country to build its own building and one of two college newspapers that continues to own its own press.
The path to becoming an independent entity began in 1968, when the university removed William R. Smoot II as editor-in-chief. The move followed critical and controversial columns in the newspaper, particularly one on October 23, 1968, that castigated university president Frederick L. Hovde.
The university informed Smoot on Friday, Nov. 8, 1968, that he was being removed, but the sixteen editors on the staff refused to accept the dictum. On Saturday, it put out a special edition with a headline, “We Will Still Publish.” By Monday, the headline was more defiant: “Smoot Will Continue: Staff”.
University officials claimed that alumni and political pressure had nothing to do with the move to remove Smoot, but Thomas Graham, a Purdue trustee later said, “Not only did I get a whole bunch of letters, I’d go down to cash a check at the bank and an old friend would grab by the front of the shirt and tell, ‘Now dammit, you know right from wrong. Now go up there and get those liberals out of that university.’ … That’s how it’s done here in southern Indiana.”
The firing of the editor pushed to the fore the issue of who owned and who was responsible for oversight of the student newspaper. The issue was given to a faculty-student-administrator committee called the Exponent Review Board, but known as the Osmun Commission for its chairman, the late Dr. John Osmun. Ultimately the Osmun Commission decided over the opposition of administration members that while Hovde had the authority to fire Smoot, the university did not follow due process. Smoot was allowed to remain as editor-in-chief.
More important in the long term, the commission recommended that the Exponent become a not-for-profit corporation headed by a publishing board, the Purdue Student Publishing Foundation. Its rent-free use that had been in place since 1933 of windowless offices in the basement of the Purdue Memorial Union would end in 1969 and the organization paid rent to the University until moving out in May 1989.
In 1975, at the urging of then Purdue President Arthur Hansen, the Exponent became free distribution with 10,000 copies distributed widely on campus.

Recent operations

The newspaper struggled through the first several years of organization, partly because it was capitalized only by operating revenues and partly because it was being forced to rent space from the university and to purchase printing equipment that had already been paid for. It went through a period of alternately making and losing money, though student staff members were all volunteers.
A critical point came in 1975 when the newspaper went to free campus-wide circulation, expanding market coverage and gaining dramatic advertising increases.
By 1988, revenues had grown substantially and the newspaper began construction on a facility that it occupies, but no longer owns, at 460 Northwestern Ave., West Lafayette.
The newspaper today distributes 10,000 copies twice-weekly during the school year and 6,000 during the summer. Revenues are nearly $1 million per year. The Exponent is only one of two college newspapers that own and operate their own printing press.
The current news adviser is Virginia Black, an award-winning journalist and editor from the South Bend Tribune.

Notable alumni