An alumni magazine is a magazine published by a university, college, or other school or by an association of a school's alumni (and sometimes current students) in order to keep alumni abreast of fellow alumni and news of their university, often with an implicit goal of fundraising.
An emerging version of alumni magazines are unrelated to educational institutions. Instead the intended readers are former employees of a company. An example of this type of alumni magazine is MoForever magazine of the law firm of Morrison & Foerster.
The oldest alumni magazine in the United States is Wayland Academy's Greetings, founded in 1882. Still published today, Greetings was initially mailed to Baptist families throughout Wisconsin, but by the July 1888 issue was devoted to "give former students a picture of present Wayland life and to furnish information regarding those who have once been its students." The oldest known university alumni magazine isYale Alumni Magazine, founded in 1891. Chartered in 1636, Harvard UniversityâÂÂthe oldest university in the U.S.--established an official alumni association in 1840 but did not publish the Harvard Bulletin until 1898. Seven years earlier, Yale University began publishing a weekly alumni publication, which has been credited as the first such periodical that dealt solely with college or university alumni matters. In 1894, Princeton University started producing the Alumni Princetonian in the Saturday edition of the student newspaper. The College of Wooster, however, has been credited as the first institution to publish an alumni magazine-the Alumni Bulletin-in 1886.
"The role of college and university magazines is to inform, interpret, interest, and at times to inspire." Over the years, the role of these magazines has evolved from serving solely as house organs of college and university administrations to independent journalistic voices that report about campus life, even if the stories may negatively portray the university that sponsors the publication. Alumni magazines generally report to different university departments. "Most of the magazines receive some support from gifts, the college and alumni. Some editors report to the alumni association, while other report to the offices of alumni relations or development."<br />The editor of the University of Idaho alumni magazine Idaho the University explicitly stated his view of the role of these publications: "Good university magazines hold themselves a little apart from the universities they serve and even farther apart from their alumni offices. They are not disloyal, but they are honest. That touch of independence is a reality check: There is a larger world to be served than just that of the university." Almost two decades earlier, Mark Singer, the former associate editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine also had strong views about the importance of maintaining an independent campus voice: "An alumni magazine should be a vehicle for continuing education; the publication that functions as a house organ is bound to estrange its audience from the intellectual life of the institution."
In April 1998, about 175 college and university alumni editors asked the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) to endorse a statement affirming the right of editorial freedom in their publications. Editors "should be assured the freedom to exercise their editorial judgment without censorship, within the framework of agree-upon editorial policy." The statement updated an earlier version on professional standards endorsed by the American Alumni Council, the predecessor of CASE. The proposed standards "balances good and bad news" and gives a "complete picture of the institution. The editors called on CASE to adopt the standards for all of its members and mediate disputes between editors and the university administration. This current discussion partially arose because of the controversial 1995 retirement of Anthony Lyle, the editor of the University of Pennsylvania alumni magazine, Pennsylvania Gazette who published some articles that upset the Penn university administration.
CASE refused the request and in October 1998 its commission on communications "concluded that it is not within CASE's mission to sponsor, endorse, or mediate the job conditions for any group of professionals within the association."
Although there are several thousand college and university alumni magazines, no comprehensive listing of these publications has been published. In 2013, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) published a study on some alumni magazine readers. Some of their findings from 252 participating institutions:
Ivy League Magazine Network (Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale) conducts surveys of its member institutions. The 2019 Media Kit published the following findings about the alumni readers of these magazines:
The Robert Sibley Magazine of the Year award, which bears the name of a former editor of the University of California at Berkeley's alumni monthly, helped initiate the award in 1943 which is the highest award given to alumni magazine editors. The first awards focusing on editorial excellence and achievement by alumni magazines were awarded by the American Alumni Council in 1929. More than 100 magazines competed for awards recognizing best editorial and best story on the achievement of an alumnus, among other topics. California MonthlyâÂÂthe predecessor publication to California, the alumni publication of the University of California, BerkeleyâÂÂtook home top honors for articles about alumni. Robert Sibley was the editor of the winning publication.