The Voice of Pratt’s Student Body

In the spring of 2003, the staff of Pratt’s longest-running student publication, The Prattler, was pulling together their first issue of the new year. “At the time, The Prattler had an office in Willoughby that also functioned as an archive,” says then–Editor in Chief Andy P. Smith, BFA Writing ’04. “One of our staff members combed through these boxes and stacks of old Prattlers and pulled out the oldest one there.” It was The Prattler’s very first issue, back when it was a weekly newspaper, from January 18, 1940. 

In that Spring 2003 issue, Smith featured the mission statement from the first issue of The Prattler on its first page. Titled “Symbol of Our Desire,” the statement reads like a manifesto for the publication, and set out a vision for The Prattler as a publication that depended on student involvement, meant to serve as an “instrument for the exchange of ideas and ideals” among the student body. 

It would also be an essential tool for building community. In the eyes of Professor Steven Doloff, who served as faculty supervisor for The Prattler just before Smith was the editor in chief, its “exchange of ideas and ideals” (to quote the founding editors) meant a lot in the era of print media. “Newspapers, not digital screens, were how people found out what was going on in their immediate vicinity,” Doloff says. The Prattler “began to function as the campus’s all-purpose paper town square, with monthly issues throughout the school year reporting on, commenting on, and provoking debate about everything going on at the Institute.”

Year after year, as the students’ interests and priorities shifted, so did The Prattler, which transformed from a newspaper to a magazine to a literary magazine. Today, the publication also has an online presence that’s accessible to an audience beyond the “paper town square” of Doloff’s era. 

The Prattler helped channel these “massive, gravitational shifts in the world.”

However, the basic principle of creating a public forum for students’ “ideas and ideals” never changed. Throughout the changing tides of the last 80-plus years, The Prattler has been a place for students to share their experiences, express their views, and process the events of their world.  

For Smith and his staff, who attended Pratt during the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, The Prattler helped channel these “massive, gravitational shifts in the world.” According to former Prattler Editor in Chief Nancy Hom, BFA Advertising and Visual Communications ’71, who covered the student protest movement of the late ’60s, the publication offered a space where “students could decide what actions resonate with them and where they can find common ground.”

It was also a place of camaraderie for each year’s staff—for Hom, The Prattler felt “like a little family dedicated to serving our Pratt community.”

Each edition was also perishable, which meant that mission never really let up.

“Prattlers, like flowers, were wilting things,” writes Doloff. “You knew in a day or a week they would turn into wrinkled, stained kitty-litter box liners. But when they showed up in freshly minted, fragrant piles, one day a month in the cafeteria, the spontaneous appreciation among campus readers was palpable, with hundreds of copies being snapped up and flipped through with anticipation by people sitting next to one another.”

Here’s a look at moments in Prattler history, a snapshot of students’ voices through the decades. 

1940s

This first issue of The Prattler typifies the publication’s early days. Back then, in its own words, The Prattler was a weekly newspaper that helped students gain a “better understanding of their mutual relations.” Bill Richards, founding editor of the publication, shared in a 2003 interview with then-editor Andy P. Smith that The Prattler started with a rather practical objective: to collate the mimeographed sheets that served as informal monthly newsletters for each of Pratt’s schools into one weekly newspaper. Richards, who was enrolled in the first class of the industrial design major, called a meeting with all of the schools to suggest a paper “that goes beyond the individual schools and tells about the sports activities, the social activities, the museums and galleries around New York, and make it all available.”

1950s

The Prattler kept its format as a weekly newspaper throughout the 1950s, bringing a journalistic approach to its coverage of campus activities like the annual Winter Festival, student government elections, athletics, and faculty promotions, along with local politics and institutional projects that would broaden the school’s academic offerings and its student body in the process. This 1954 issue features a front page story about the launch of a $1,750,000 (nearly $20 million by today’s standard) project to construct two residence halls and other buildings, add courses, and create the School of Architecture, marking a time of expansion that would shape Pratt students’ future.

1960s

In 1969, with the rise of the anti-war and student protest movement across the United States and social-political tensions mounting nationally and on their own campus, Pratt students initiated a strike. While the student body protested student disenfranchisement, Prattler editor in chief Nancy Hom and her staff covered student voices across the campus, from strike dissenters in the Young Americans for Freedom to the Students for a Democratic Society to the Black Students Union, who each wrote up position papers with lists of demands. “We published all their positions,” Hom says. “We wanted to cover as many activities as possible, including strike activities in other colleges, to show the breadth of this student awareness and activism. It was important to show the Pratt students that they were part of a larger movement.”

1970s

While the art curriculum was undergoing a revision in 1972, creating, in the words of The Prattler contributor and Art and Design alumnus Robert Castro,“freedom in the school itself,” The Prattler shifted from a black-and-white newspaper to a playful magazine with pops of color, featuring far-out illustrations, student poetry, and reviews of groundbreaking records from the time by the likes of David Bowie and The Who. Fittingly for an article admiring the shift from an “old, rigid structure” to a curriculum with more individualized paths for students, Castro’s story embodied The Prattler’s new spirit with a bright pink, abstract illustration by a student artist.

1980s

In the late ’70s through much of the ’80s, The Prattler became, in the words of Professor Steven Doloff, a “relatively modest publication of some 8 to 10 pages, filled mostly with ads for local businesses.” This changed by the late ’80s, when, under the editorial guidance of Editor in Chief Michele Lifshen, BFA Fine Arts ’90, it transformed into what Doloff calls a “ripsnorting newspaper.” Lifshen’s Prattler was a galvanizing force, with moments like a Letter from the Editor section that once featured a letter for students to cut out and mail to their congressperson, protesting legislation that would prohibit National Endowment for the Arts funding for art deemed “obscene,” directly declaring: “The government may not break the First Amendment by discrimination in its support of the arts.”

1990s

When Jean Shin, BFA Fine Arts ’94; MS ’96, now adjunct professor (CCE) of fine arts, served as editor in chief, she kept Lifshen’s politically engaged vision alive, covering social justice movements on campus and the city at large. In the issue themed Being Woman, her feature about the Guerrilla Girls—the anonymous group of female artists who, clad in their signature gorilla masks, target sexism and racism in the art world—was paired with a sister article assessing how many women artists galleries around SoHo were featuring. That piece, written by student reporter Hindy Preskin, MFA Fine Arts ’95, was a direct action against misogyny in the art world that mirrored the Guerrilla Girls’ rebellious spirit: “One gallery tried to take my notebook away out of fear that perhaps I was a news reporter (or maybe a Guerrilla Girl),” writes Preskin.

2000s

By the time Andy P. Smith arrived at The Prattler, it had gone from a “ripsnorting” periodical to a newsletter. He decided to reinvent the publication altogether, into a magazine with an edge that drew from early ’00s counterculture—with offbeat design, a sardonic writing style, and, at its most freewheeling, the chronicling of a Prattler staff trip to Celebration, Florida—a suburb of Orlando—in a freedom-themed issue. “It was the time of freedom fries,” says Smith. “We were able to go to the student activities administration and say, ‘We’re going to Orlando in search of freedom. We’re going to go to this planned community to do some investigative reporting.’ And that’s what we did.” 

2010s

As The Prattler transformed into a magazine, it retained its coverage of social issues on campus. Following Pratt’s long tradition of activism, students drew inspiration from the Occupy Wall Street movement and participated in a nationwide walkout. The article “Occupied Pratt” followed these student activists protesting increased economic disparity in the United States and on college campuses across the country as they marched from the Pratt Cannon to Zuccotti Park in Manhattan “to join the multitudes already gathered there.” This being the Versus Issue, the editors also covered another side of the topic—being too busy to protest—in a comic.

2020s

Under the leadership of Editor in Chief Ingrid Jones, BFA Writing ’24, The Prattler was remodeled into a literary magazine and an online publication. “The publication had been pretty strictly journalistic, and I wanted to shift gears,” says Jones. “I saw The Prattler as a student outlet meant for whatever we wanted to do and say about the world we were experiencing.”  Sarina Greene, BFA Writing ’26, captured this new direction in “A Safe Haven for Writers,” a piece in The Dystopia/Utopia Issue about creative writers’ processes throughout the Institute. In Greene’s words, these writers, whose inspirations range from fantasy to cinema, are united in their pursuit to “embody a future that hasn’t been written yet.”

Images courtesy of Pratt Archives