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Daily Titan history and reunion pages 
The Daily Titan is more than 35 years old now. Counting its
journalistic predecessors, there has been a student newspaper at Cal State
Fullerton for 45 years. These web pages commemorate the
Daily
Titan's early history on the occasion of the staff reunion Nov. 5,
2000.
When "Orange County State College" first offered classes in 1959, the dean of students and student leaders acted quickly to establish a campus paper. They called it the Titan Times, and its first issue appeared Jan. 4, 1960. Dean of Students Ernest A. Becker was the first faculty adviser. The paper was published bi-monthly at first. After the Communications Department was established and assumed responsibility for the paper, James Alexander and J. William Maxwell both served as faculty advisers. The Titan Times was published weekly from 1961 until 1965, when it became a twice-a-week paper under editor Jim Drummond. The issue shown here is notable not only because it was the first published on a twice-weekly schedule but also because it reported the appointment of Miles McCarthy to a deanship. He later served as CSUF president. McCarthy Hall was named in his honor. 
A major transition began in 1968,. The college was rapidly becoming
a university and the Communications Department was growing. Editor
Paul Attner and his staff decided to drop "Times" from the name and publish
the Titan (shown at right) three days a week. A year later,
editor Bill Schreiber and his staff changed the paper's name to the Daily
Titan and adopted a four-day-a-week publication schedule. That
was also the year that the paper moved into the then-new Humanities Building
and settled in H-213--the Daily Titan's home for the next 32 years.
And 1969 marked the beginning of on-campus typesetting and production,
using the system shown in the 1970 technology photos (see links above).
When the Daily Titan was launched in 1969, there was unprecedented turmoil here and at hundreds of other colleges and universities across America. Students protested against the Vietnam war and the military draft, campaigned for justice at home and challenged authority as never before. In the end, perhaps the most decisive and enduring victory won by the students of that era was greater First Amendment freedom for college and university students. Even now, in a time when the courts are narrowing the scope of student freedom rather than expanding it further, students enjoy far greater freedom on campus than they did before the late 1960s. These web pages offer a glimpse of the turmoil of that era in contrast to the business-attired professionalism (well, sometimes!) of the students who pioneered daily newspaper journalism at CSUF. I was in the right place at the right time to be the first faculty adviser of the Daily Titan--I served as the adviser from 1968 until 1973. -Wayne Overbeck
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