Taylor Wyatt, Contributing Writer
After more than a decade of hiatus, students are reviving Sewanee’s yearbook, “The Cap and Gown.” However, questions of its sustainability, the required workload and the level of campus interest remain.
For over a century, Sewanee students preserved stories about life here on the Mountain in the school’s yearbook, the Cap and Gown. Published intermittently from 1891 to 2013, the yearbook upheld two of Sewanee’s most cherished values: tradition and community. Students would get to read about their peers’ academic achievements, Greek life stories, volunteering and community outreach and other moments that helped to define Sewanee outside of just education.
However, yearbooks decreased steadily in popularity throughout the nation. This downturn was worsened by the spread of technology. Social media provides a unique space to share the stories and achievements that yearbooks traditionally documented. Yearbook committees at universities were usually (if not always) student-run, which meant they usually lacked the necessary resources to manage both the hefty costs and workload requirements. A Houston Public Media article stated, “producing a college yearbook can cost anywhere from $35,000 to more than $100,000. When the recession hit in 2008, media departments at some universities had a tough choice to make.”
Sewanee’s Cap and Gown was unfortunately not free from these pressures, which led to its discontinuation in 2013. Cap and Gown now leaves a century-long legacy of archived volumes in the duPont library, which captured what life was like on the mountain before this tradition was left behind.
Now more than a decade later, students are questioning whether or not it’s the yearbooks time to be renewed here on campus. Jack Slade (C ’26), one of the students aiding the revival effort, said the idea came about when browsing the University archives.
“After browsing the old yearbooks in the library, we began to wonder why Sewanee stopped producing them in 2013,” he said. “We couldn’t help but think, if no one in our class started it, how long would it be before someone did?”
For him and his peers, this question felt urgent. “We are so lucky to call this place home for four years, and there is no better way to commemorate those years than a physical piece of memorabilia that we can take with us when we leave,” he said.
In a digitally dominated world, the yearbook’s revival represents a physical time capsule of memories that helps define a place and the experiences that make it so special.
Supporters of the yearbook revival say that Sewanee’s connected culture makes a tangible record even more meaningful. “Since Sewanee cultivates such a tight-knit community, we thought it was important to have a single, physical form of memorabilia to commemorate our years here on the Mountain,” Slade said.
Still, Slade explained the question of publication poses some significant challenges, like being able to capture all Sewanee has to offer. “At Sewanee, everyone has a story, and that’s what makes it so special. We want to ensure that everyone who wants to be featured in the yearbook is included. While that isn’t necessarily a challenge, since nearly every student here is involved in something on campus, it is difficult to organize the yearbook in a way that truly captures all the different perspectives at Sewanee,” Slade said.
Every student on campus brings something different to the table. The student body here is a collective of incredibly passionate and talented individuals, which can make every achievement and story hard to document on the mountain. Greek organizations, artistic groups, community engagement and other extracurriculars make Sewanee a hub of stories that are worth memorializing. Ensuring that each of these perspectives gets the proper credit requires extensive coordination, writing, design, photography, editing and other journalistic elements that require a much larger team than what is available. With such limited resources, organizing both a cohesive and inclusive yearbook can feel daunting.
To address some of these concerns, the team has already been brainstorming ways to make this workload a little more possible to complete. “We decided to break it down into the seasons of Sewanee, so there will be a fall, winter, spring and even a summer section. Organizing it chronologically highlights how Sewanee’s activities depend on the season… When remembering Sewanee, we remember it through the different semesters and months, so we thought it would be best to organize it how the Sewanee students do,” Slade said.
Interest in the project has grown steadily. Slade noted how early outreach groups through campus-wide emails showed interest from students and faculty. Administrators such as Dean Nicky Campbell, former assistant director of student involvement Carter Brown and his successor Maya Quick have met this outreach with enthusiasm.
However, producing a yearbook means hard and consistent work throughout the entire academic year. Also, there is the question of a physical yearbook’s relevance in today’s digital age.
The debate ultimately reflects a broader tension here at Sewanee: how to honor the value of tradition, while also adapting to contemporary times. Sewanee prides itself on centuries of history, yet it’s also continually evolving. The return of Cap and Gown sits at this intersection.
Whether the yearbook will return or not is uncertain. What is certain, however, is that students are actively reconsidering how Sewanee chooses to remember itself. If revived successfully, the yearbook will be another contributor to Sewanee’s thriving community and how it hopes to be remembered for years to come.