A New Student Newspaper

(If you are receiving this email, it means you were on the email list of Young Americans for Solidarity. The Collegiate Commons is set to release at https://www.thecollegiatecommons.com on August 9th).

Our Mission

The Collegiate Commons was founded in the Fall of 2023 on the campus of Indiana University-Indianapolis with the foundational idea that journalism ought to strengthen our democracy.

We firmly believe that local communities and local families are the best places to start.

As an independent student-led paper, however, we realized that other newspapers were failing to reach our peers during their period of transitioning as they try to find their place in their family and their community.

We hope to help. While educating students as citizens, we hope to connect them to the wider world and point out solidarity within the community that they may not have known existed. 

Like the campus commons, we serve to unify students and give them a sense of community.

It all seems to come down to relationships.

If we can help students better understand how they depend on their community and how their community depends on them, that’s an important first step in figuring out their place in the world. 

So that’s the mission behind our news, and that’s what we’ll take with us as we cover college campuses and communities in central Indiana. 

Life matters. Community matters. Students matter. 

Our History

Student journalism at Indiana University and Purdue University has a long history. The Daily Student (later the Indiana Daily Student) was the first student publication, founded in 1967. The IU Journalism Department was founded in 1911, and took over the paper in 1915. 

One year later, the Indianapolis extension office of Indiana University opened. In 1964, the Purdue Component was founded at the Purdue extension campus in Indianapolis. In 1969, the IU and Purdue campuses in Indianapolis merged to form what became IUPUI. 

In 1970 the IU Onomatopoeia was established at the IU Indianapolis campus, and in 1971 the Onomatopoeia and the Component merged to form the Sagamore. That paper stopped publication in 2009, and The Campus Citizen started publication at IUPUI in 2011. 

The Collegiate Commons was founded by concerned students to serve the community in 2023, shortly before the IUPUI campus was set to split once more into IU-Indianapolis and the Purdue extension campus in Indianapolis. 

There are two major public and six major private institutions of higher education in Indianapolis, and we hope to emphasize the common ground that students in each institution and others in central Indiana share, and give them a sense of community as the campus commons usually serve to do within each university.  

Our Philosophy

Why is there a pelican in our logo, you might ask? The pelican has traditionally been a symbol associated with self-sacrifice, as the pelican was once believed to pierce its own breast with its beak and feed its young with its blood. The symbol represents our belief in the common good and finding a purpose in seeking it. 

We are a non-sectarian, non-partisan paper, but we recognize the special role that Christian thought played in developing the values we hold dear, especially Christian Democracy, subsidiarity, and the whole life ethic. 

Those are a lot of big words, but they really just mean we emphasize the importance of human dignity at all stages of life, the value of communities, families, labor, and local decision making, and the importance of religious faith and freedom for the health of a community. 

In fact, some of our staff members are members of the Young Americans for Solidarity, which is the youth wing of the American Solidarity Party, a third party which advocates for many of the same principles. 

The Collegiate Commons, however, is independent and does not endorse political candidates or parties, nor does it participate in lobbying.