To the Editor,
I read with great interest the Editor’s Note in your September 25 issue, in which you advised the community that its newspaper would now be called The Choate News.
This is an unfortunate decision which does very little to acknowledge the students who joined our community in 1971, when Rosemary Hall swapped Greenwich, Conn., for Wallingford and the upper campus of The Choate School. It seems to me that The News was selected as a name that would be inclusive and not align the publication with one school or the other. Whether or not the school’s cheer, its apparel, or other “physical representations” only use the word Choate does not mean that an historic school publication must align itself with a trend that seems at least partially driven by marketing concerns. And, really, just because “Choate” has become “vernacular,” is that reason to further polarize the community? Must everything have the same boar icon or the same crest? While The News does not specifically acknowledge the existence of Rosemary Hall, it does (for those who remember) assert that we were not always “Choate.” I graduated from a small girls’ school in New Haven—a school whose identity has since been subsumed by the larger schools with which it merged. The ‘history of what has happened here’ (or at my alma mater) is not preserved by eradicating what once was.
I hope that you and the editorial board will reconsider your decision.
Sincerely,
Nancy C. Miller
