History of the Polemic

The Polemic was a parody of The Polytechnic at RPI in the early 1980s. Its staff would take words from teh headlines in the Poly, rearrange them, and write new stories to fit the headline.

Collected here (to start) are the issues from the first 5 academic years that the Poly was produced. During much of the time it was headquartered in Wiltsie 202 and was never officially sanctioned by the Union.

Here is a picture of the staff:

Since we were an underground paper, we were only known by our initials!

1980-1981 Volume I

1981-1982 Volume II

1982-1983 Volume III

1983-1984 Volume IIII

1984-1985 Volume V

One of our biggest capers was producing the Poleytechnic in actual Poly format (newsprint, typeset, printed on a real printing press) in a run of over 5,000 on April 1, 1983. Here are some photos of us picking up the press run at the printer:

And here are scan of the paper itself. These are at a modest resolution, higher resolution scans are available.

The Poleytechnic

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