The Bates Student

The Bates Student

Bates Student cover from the 1870s
Type	Weekly student newspaper
Owner(s)	Bates College
Editor-in-chief	Julia Mongeau
Founded	1873
Language	English
Headquarters	Lewiston, Maine
Website	www.thebatesstudent.com

The Bates Student, established in 1873, is the newspaper of Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, run entirely by students. It is one of the oldest continuously-published college weeklies in the United States and claims to be the oldest co-ed college weekly in the nation.

Approximately 1,900 copies of The Student are printed every week and distributed to hundreds of alumni, parents, and other friends of the College. The paper is published each Tuesday while classes are in session and is distributed to New Commons (~1,000 copies), the Chase Hall Post Office (~400), the newsroom in Chase Hall (~100), the Lane Hall mail room (~300, to be sent to trustees, alumni, subscribers and students studying abroad), Ladd Library (~25), and Pettengill Hall (~75). The Student has been intermittently online since the late 1990s. Once a year, usually at the end of the year, The Student runs a spoof edition commonly known as the "Bates Spudent."

The Bates Student was founded as a combination of the college's newspaper and literary magazine and as a successor to earlier publications such as the Seminary Advocate (1855–1863) and College Courant (ca. 1864-1872).The Bates Student was founded in 1873 in the years following the Civil War. It describes itself as "the nation's oldest continuously co-ed college weekly," although this assertion has been contested. Since many college newspapers were founded around the same time, there have been competing claims for which one was the oldest or the first in the United States. For example, The Bowdoin Orient, founded two years earlier in 1871, claims to be the "oldest continuously-published college weekly", but Bowdoin was an all male school; the Yale Daily News claims to be the "oldest college daily"; the Harvard Crimson, also founded in 1873, claims to "the nation's oldest continuously published daily college newspaper"; the The Dartmouth began in 1843 as a monthly and tries to claim institutional continuity with a local eighteenth-century paper called the Dartmouth Gazette. Accordingly, The Bates Student has claimed that it is the oldest continuously-published weekly newspaper from a co-educational college. In the late 19th century, the paper was published on a bi-weekly basis, and in the early 20th century, it was published on a weekly basis. It has been published continuously and without interruption during each academic year since 1873.