Where Did the “Ivy” Go, and How Do We Get it Back?

Savannah Brooks ’26

Managing Editor

As I near my final year ‘neath the elms, I find myself continuing to hope against hope that Trinity will magically decide to bring the Ivy, Trinity’s yearbook, back for my class. But, as I have learned recently while crusading to ensure last year’s Trinity Papers are actually published on the digital repository (spoiler alert: I’m still waiting), Trinity publications can seemingly fall into the administrative wasteland very easily, with nobody really knowing where they went or who to ask about them. So, I am perhaps misusing my public platform to ask for a boon; bring the Ivy back!

For those of you who are unfamiliar, here’s a little history lesson. The Ivy has been Trinity’s yearbook since 1873 until it was put on what became a permanent pause in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to 2020, the last time the Ivy had missed a year of publication was in 1946 due to the war. For those studying Trinity’s history, along with the Tripod and the various other student publications which have come and gone over the years, the Ivy is a crucial resource for researching past students, college events or understanding campus life during times of national crisis. The Ivy is particularly helpful in tracking the history of clubs, or for judging now-famous alumni (Tucker Carlson ’91, the Tripod’s favorite alumnus to mock, put on his yearbook profile that he was a part of the Dan White Society, a fake club named after the assassin who killed Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California). 

Of course, a class yearbook is more than just an important archival source. It also gives students a chance to come together to share memories, whether in the actual process of building and contributing to the yearbook or decades after. A core moment in life is finding your yearbook in the back of the hall closet, collecting dust, and bringing it out to show kids what life in the 2020s was like. Sure, now we have the photos app on our phones and Instagram to preserve our lives, but digital content is actually much more subject to decay and loss than physical media (particularly physical media like yearbooks that are widely printed, distributed and archived). This also presents a challenge for the College itself when it comes to preserving college history; the Ivy is something they can digitize and publicize, unlike social media. 

For those of you who don’t know (and maybe don’t care) about the Tripod’s inner workings, we spend the vast majority of our budget every year on printing. Our weekly paper is not cheap, so make sure to thank the SGA budget committee for the paper that is delivered to you in Mather every Tuesday. You may wonder, if it’s so expensive, why do we continue to print at all? Well, keeping an archive is a significant part of that. It is far more difficult to archive a website than a physical newspaper (as our current website woes are demonstrating), and as Olivia has mentioned in a previous editorial, one of the most important duties of the Tripod, in this Editorial Board’s opinion, is our position as a campus archive.

I am not sure why the Ivy has not returned since its suspension. I doubt it was out of purposeful malice, and my guess would be that it was simply one of those things that was dropped and never picked back up after the pandemic. But, before it becomes an entirely too distant memory, I hope that Trinity will consider bringing it back. Not just for class glorification or individual preservation, but for the future, and for our history. After all, I can’t imagine many people would be too happy about the 2020s being entirely represented by the Tripod…

– SNB