Ursinus Today - The Empty Era
Today in the 21st century, it's bizarre to even imagine colleges promoting smoking with the appearance of these cigarette ads in publicly sold prints. It's even crazier to see Ursinus - a private liberal arts school with only about 1,400 undergraduates - as one of these colleges. Why did Ursinus have these ads? Perhaps it was the only way the college could afford to publish the Weekly/Grizzly and the Lantern - the college certainly received profit by including advertisements from Chesterfield and Camel.
Nowadays, such is different. All of the advertisements, not just the smoking ones, have disappeared from The Grizzly and The Lantern, never to be seen again. There's no explicit reason for this. We can only assume it's due to the funds not being needed anymore.
Still, it's quite amazing to see how much the Grizzly and Lantern have changed in thirty years and seventy years. The Grizzly has remained active, pumping out weekly editions for everyone to enjoy. However, in the past two years there's been a major change: there's a website. It's incredibly easy to navigate, separated into different topics and information about the staff. We could never dream about this happening in the 1940's and 1980's. And it's all being created and presented to the world without the help of advertisements.
As for the Lantern, there's still a wide range of literature to be found - Nonfiction, Poetry, Fiction - and, more recently beautiful art. The staff has once again changed the number of editions released in a year from two to one, but it allows the staff to focus on quality versus quantity. There's no advertisements to take up space - more room for literature now.
In the end, the Ursinus newspaper and literary magazine are incredible editions to the college. Both are completely run by the students, for the students. The two are as strong as ever with their stunning news, writing, and art. The fact that these clubs are still running since 1902 and 1933 shows how important they are to Ursinus College.