For student publications, what’s in a name?
Use of Yale name requires approval, but rejections are rare
For student publications, what’s in a name?
Use of Yale name requires approval, but rejections are rare
Thursday, December 3, 2009
When Eric Ward ’10 and Elisa Gonzalez ’11 decided to found an undergraduate magazine called The Yale (College) Book Review, The Yale Review asked them to rethink their name.
The two English majors wanted to revive an undergraduate book review called The Yale Review of Books, published from 2001 to 2004. But The Yale Review, the oldest quarterly literary magazine in the nation, took issue. Though Undergraduate Regulations require students to obtain permission to use the word “Yale” in publication names, it is very rare that an undergraduate magazine’s name is rejected, said John Meeske, Yale College’s associate dean for physical resources and planning, who reviews all new undergraduate publications.
A quest to revive a publication leads to a naming controversy.
J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review, explained that the original undergraduate publication’s name was too similar to The Yale Review’s. Publishers sent books to the wrong publication and Internet searches yielded the incorrect Web site, he said. In fact, the Web site of the old undergraduate review has a link that reads, “Looking for The Yale Review?”
By 2004, after discussions with McClatchy and the Yale College Dean’s Office, the publication ceased to exist, McClatchy said.
“The name ripped off not so much The Yale Review as The New York Review of Books,” he added.
When Ward and Gonzalez asked English professor Anne Fadiman to be their adviser, she brought the new publication to The Yale Review’s attention. Fadiman knew there had previously been a problem with the name and wanted to alert The Yale Review, McClatchy said. Fadiman declined to comment.
“If Walt Disney sees Mickey Mouse being used elsewhere, he wants to protect that property,” McClatchy said.
After Ward and Gonzalez met with McClatchy and Meeske, they settled on a different name — The Critic, Meeske said.
The editors of The Critic also declined to comment on the issue.
“It is our hope that the publication will be known for its content, not for its name,” Gonzalez explained in an e-mail.
Meeske said he has yet to refuse permission to the founders of a publication who have asked to use the college’s name based on the substance of the magazine. However, publications are often asked to include qualifiers in their publication names, such as “An Undergraduate Publication,” to make clear that the college is not responsible for the content. The Critic was an unusual case because of the past friction between The Yale Review and The Yale Review of Books.
Christopher Magoon ’11, founder of the Yale Historical Review, said using the words “Yale” and “Review” in the publication’s title was not a problem, though the staff had to fill out an application to explain why they wanted to use the University’s name. Staff members from four other student publications with “Yale” in their titles, including the recently launched Yale Epicurean, also said they did not have any trouble acquiring permission.
The Critic, which has not yet printed its first issue, will review contemporary fiction and nonfiction and intends to print three issues a year, beginning this year, Ward said at an informational meeting for the magazine.
Comments
None 2 years, 5 months ago
The Yale Review of Books (whose full name was "The Yale Review of Books: An Undergraduate Publication," for the reasons discussed in this article) had a longer history than this article states: the magazine started in the fall of 1997.
The magazine had a good run (seven years - that's quite a lot of Yalies and reviews). It's too bad that in the end, the Dean's office caved in to Sandy McClatchy's lobbying and killed it. I always thought that adding "An Undergraduate Publication" was a reasonable compromise that should have satisfied him. There was never any real evidence that people confused the two publications in the first place. (The web link cited in the article was just there, I suspect, to placate McClatchy.) However, McClatchy was apparently never satisfied with the compromise, and I guess in 2004 he finally got his way.
Best of luck to the students trying to revive the magazine - under whatever name they're allowed to use!
None 2 years, 5 months ago
The Yale Review of Books should definitely be revived. Good luck to Ward & Gonzalez.
None 2 years, 5 months ago
3, you sound like the POR members who still claim that the Conservative Party was started in 1996 instead of in the 19th century. The two claims are consistent because a literary quarterly is NOT a newspaper, and in any event the YDN only claims to be the oldest DAILY college newspaper.
None 2 years, 4 months ago
The Yale Review of Books, when it started in the late 1990s, was actually the first undergraduate book review in the country. A few other schools -- e.g. the Oxonian Review of Books at Oxford, the somewhat short-lived Dartmouth Contemporary at Dartmouth, etc. -- started up their undergraduate book reviews in the wake of the Yale Review of Books. But Yale was first.
Hopefully Eric Ward and Elisa Gonzalez can revive it, even if under a new name. Good luck!
None 2 years, 5 months ago
I find it somewhat disingenuous that the Yale Review purports itself to be the oldest literary quarterly in the US. That another publication was started in 1819 and had subsequent changes in thrust and name does not allow such a claim. In fact, as currently constituted the Yale Review only dates to 1911. The oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the US is the "Sewanee Review" published by the University of the South. No name changes, no changes in intent of the publishers or content of the quarterly. Yale's claim to the having the oldest collegiate newspaper in the US specifically notes that the YDN predates Harvard's Crimson because the Crimson was previously published under the name "The Magenta" and as such is a different organ than the Crimson. Using the YDN logic Yale cannot lay claim to the oldest literary quarterly in the US. Change one of the other. If the YDN is the oldest collegiate newspaper then the Yale Review is not the oldest quarterly review. If the Review is the oldest literary quarterly then the YDN is not the oldest collegiate newspaper. You can't have it both ways.
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