The Politic is Yale’s undergraduate journal of politics and culture. The Politic traces its roots to 1947, when a group of students started the Yale Political Journal: A Magazine of Student Opinion, or the Journal for short. “We have coined as our by-line, ‘a magazine of student opinion,’” the founding editors wrote, “presupposing that student opinion is worthy of separation from the attitudes of other groups and that it is worthy as well of attention and study.” Though over the years the Journal dissolved, this founding belief did not.
In 1979, Robert Kagan ’80, now a historian and foreign policy commentator, revived the publication under a new name, Yale Political Monthly. At the time, Kagan was “frustrated that things tended to be one sided” at Yale, and he sought to provide a non-partisan platform for debate on campus. Other Editors-in-Chief who inherited the Political Monthly included Gideon Rose ’85, now Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Affairs, and Fareed Zakaria ’86, now a CNN host and author.
Students relaunched the publication again in 2001, this time as The Politic, in response to increased interest in politics on campus following the 2000 presidential election. The new editors hoped to create a forum for members of the Yale community to “learn from the experiences and historical perspectives of current governments.”
Since then, The Politic has continued to publish long form pieces in print. But The Politic has also expanded beyond the monthly magazine. Our website is home to daily articles and multimedia projects. In 2014, The Politic interviewed more than 100 diplomats and published the collection as a book, Diplomatic Discourse. Ahead of the presidential election, The Politic surveyed Yale students from all fifty states for their impressions of and predictions for the election and published them in an interactive map. And in 2017, The Politic released its first documentary, Resettled: New Haven’s Refugee Community. On campus, The Politic regularly hosts events as part of our speaker series, The Politic Presents, for the Yale community.
