The Centennial Ledger: 100 Years of Reporting the End of the World
A century ago, in 1926, the Drexel we know now as a university was still the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry. The air in West Philadelphia smelled of coal and the desperate optimism of the Sesquicentennial Exposition, a world’s fair intended to celebrate 150 years of American independence. It was, by most accounts, a rainy, financial disaster. Yet, amidst the mud and the debt, student Thomas T. Mather ‘27 looked at a campus centered entirely in the Main Building and decided we needed a record. He founded The Triangle.
Today, as we celebrate our 100th anniversary, the coal is gone, replaced by the sterile glass of countless towering buildings and the relentless digital optimization of the student experience. But despite the vast number of changes, the same cool February air and the sense of an impending storm remain, raising the question: Will we still be here in 100 more years?
Drifting from Steam to Silicon
In 1926, the university was an accessible ladder for the working class, a place where, as founder Anthony J. Drexel envisioned, students could gain the knowledge necessary to both understand the world as it was and to keep up with where the future would take it. Unlike the shallowness of current institutional rhetoric, not unique to Drexel, was a contract written in soot-stained industrialism: we will teach you to make things, to build things, to participate in the material transformation of the world.
The 1926 student walked through West Philadelphia, known as the “Workshop of the World,” where factories produced locomotives, textiles, and the steel bones of American infrastructure. The city had density in both its population and purpose: the sense that what happened here mattered, that labor had consequences, that your neighbor’s strike or your boss’s greed could reshape your week. You could trace the supply chain with your eyes. The shirt on your back came from a mill you could visit. The train that took you to campus was forged in a foundry whose smoke you could see from the Main Building.
In that era, reporting was a deliberate act. The mass media culture of the modern world—the doom-scrolling, the instant push notification—did not exist. If you wanted to know what was going on around you, you read the local paper or tuned into the nascent crackle of the radio. Precisely because information moved slowly, it had to be more precise. Once it was printed, it stuck.
This is where The Triangle found its necessity. Student papers mattered because people wanted to hear what was happening from the people standing right next to them. It provided a counter-narrative to the Philadelphia Inquirer, focusing on the hyper-local issues that affected the community’s literal backyards.
One thing that is not very different, however, is the way our institutions continue to avoid accountability. It is certainly not a trend unique to Drexel, but most definitely visible within its evolution. In 1926, the “Institute” was a smaller, more intimate beast. If something went wrong, you knew which office to storm. Today, as Drexel has matured into a massive, multi-campus research powerhouse, it has also adopted the posture of a corporation.
This is not necessarily an indictment, as Drexel’s growth has brought prestige, a world-class co-op program, and transformative research. But it does help to provide an honest observation of a shift. We have moved from a community of “builders” to a system of “users.” Accountability is now buried under layers of “strategic initiatives” and SEO-optimized press releases. We have traded the smoke-filled room for the encrypted Slack channel, where the goal has gone beyond just leading to optimizing the student experience until all the “friction,” the dissent, the questioning, the human messiness, is smoothed away.
The Horizon of Erasure (2026–2126)
If the last 100 years were about the transition from steam to silicon, the next 100 will be about the struggle for existence itself. As we look toward 2126, we are facing a series of mounting, existential pressures that make the “will we be here” question feel less like a thought experiment and more like a deadline.
First, there is, of course, the Climate Horizon. We can no longer treat the environment as a background character in our history. According to the data available from our own Drexel researchers, Philadelphia is facing a future of sobering projections. By the 2080s, sea levels in the Philadelphia region are projected to rise between 24 and 38 inches. The Schuylkill River, which we cross daily to reach Center City, will become less of a simple scene view and more and more of a rising threat. If these trends continue, the Drexel of 2126 may be more akin to an archipelago. The “Workshop of the World” might be reclaimed by the water it once used to power its mills.
Then, there is the Digital Horizon.
Our monsters are algorithmic rather than creatures of myth. We are entering an era where AI is predicted to outwrite humans in terms of sheer volume. The web is already being flooded with functionally infinite machine-generated content, threatening to flatten the value of actual reporting alongside the already vast declines in print journalism. Journalism’s core value, the promise that a real person actually went out, witnessed a thing, and stood behind their words, is under siege. If the university experience becomes fully “optimized” by AI and predictive algorithms, we risk losing the “friction” that creates critical thinkers.
Yet, there is some hope to be found here because of these countless issues. These mounting crises (the climate, the algorithms, the institutional opacity) are precisely what make a human record more valuable than ever. We are tired. But that exhaustion is actually a sign of a deep, human hunger for truth that has weight. Drexel has survived the Great Depression, the transition from an “Institute” to a “University,” and the near-collapse of The Triangle itself in 2019 when it ran out of funding. It survived because people decided that an independent voice was worth more than a line item on a budget. That is why I believe we will be here in 100 more years, because while it will be hard, the more “sterile” and “automated” the world becomes, the more we will crave the grit and honesty of a student’s perspective.
The next century will be about building defenses, specifically against the erasure of what makes us human. We will have to build a campus that can withstand the rising tides and a culture that can withstand the rising noise of the digital age.
Conclusion
For 100 years, The Triangle has been that friction. We have been the thorn in the side of the administration and the mirror held up to the city. For the next 100 (if we are to survive the floods, the bots, and the managed silence), this paper must be the thing that refuses to let the university, the city, and the world forget what it feels like to push back.
The old world is indeed dying, and we still do not know if the new one can be born. With a century of soot on our hands and a century of silicon in our pockets, we continue to do the only thing we know how to do: we report. Here is to the next hundred years of The Triangle.