It is correct, but no one verifies it, until one day someone says, ‘Wait a minute, you're not the oldest. We're the oldest.’
This tagline lasted until 2015, when editor-in-chief Reis Thebault changed it to the historically-accurate tagline of “Oldest College Newspaper West of the Alleghenies,” which is what it is today.
At the start of his tenure, Thebault and his staff decided to reimagine the print product, hoping to give the paper a more professional look. In doing so, they came across an old copy of The Miami Student with the current tagline used today.
“Our tagline was the oldest college newspaper in America, which was a claim we always doubted,” Thebault said. “As badly as we would have liked to hold that distinction, it just wasn’t true. And when we saw ‘The Oldest College Newspaper West of the Alleghenies,’ we loved it. It had this 19th-century spirit that spoke to The Student's long legacy.”
However, Johnson said The Miami Student is the oldest continuously published newspaper in the country, with its founding date being only preceded by Dartmouth College’s The Dartmouth, first published in 1799. However, The Dartmouth did not continuously publish in the last 227 years, giving The Miami Student the opportunity to argue its position for oldest college newspaper in the U.S.
Despite controversies with the founding date, The Student has continuously covered campus and community issues, as well as commenting on national affairs, since its official founding date under its current name. Over the years, it has evolved from a campus record to a source of news for Miami students, alumni, faculty and administration, as well as Oxford residents.