The Cardinal and Cream, Lest We Forget, The Torch, the Unionite, Union Today and the Journal of the Union Faculty Forum are all the publications of Union University in 1998. Each caters to a specific audience and fulfills a unique purpose.

Today almost any faculty member or aspiring journalist, poet, writer or designer can try publishing their work and, in the case of students, gain valuable experience. In Union's early years, students and faculty had but one publication, if that, to read about Union news and to publish their own writings on campus.

Union's oldest publication, The Classic Union, was introduced in 1855. The Classic Union, while lasting only two years, remained "devoted to religion, literature and general intelligence." A publication of its kind would not be revived until the Unionite in 1948.

Thirty years after the inception of The Classic Union on the Murfreesboro campus, Southwestern Baptist University's first student newspaper went to press in 1885. Much like today's student newspaper, The Stirring Times was written by students under the supervision of a faculty member. The Southwestern Baptist catalog says the newspaper was run by "live, progressive young men" who had this to say about the mission of their newspaper:

"We hope merely to assist in the transmitting of the light and beauty of which our language can be made the vehicle, and thus awaken in those now careless, a desire to know something of the grand language we speak."

When The Stirring Times ceased publication is uncertain. It was followed by The Eatonian, which lasted until 1908. Within the same year, the Cardinal and Cream began. According to Richard Ward's History of Union, the University changed its school colors from gold and blue to match the name of its student publication.

The C & C's first editor, I.W. Shannon, made this call his first editorial: "To do this (to successfully publish a newspaper) he cooperation of the students is absolutely necessary. No student must think that the paper is controlled by a monopoly at the hands of the editors for it belongs as much to one as another." In 1914, the school catalog detailed the publication as a "live, breezy college paper."

Before the University had a student newspaper, it had a yearbook. In 1904 the campus fraternities created Lest We Forget, to be published every other year. It was described as a "bright, breezy resume of the year's happenings" in Union's 1914 catalog. The book graduated to an annual in 1924 and has remained so ever since.

Union's Honors program launched The Torch in 1962, with the hope of giving "public recognition and encouragement" to Union students, according to John V. Myers, then Chairman of the Honors Program Committee. Unlike the art and literature focus of today's Torch, early contributions reached across all the disciplines of the University, including Mathematics, the sciences, English and Religious Studies. In fact, the first story in the first Torch was titled, "Chemistry of Muscle Contraction," by Dan Stone, a senior in the Biology department.

Faculty became regular contributors to The Torch. The development of the Journal of the Union Faculty Forum in 1977 gave the faculty a more specific outlet for campus publication.

In fall 1998, Union introduced its new online publication, Union Today, making even more information about the University accessible with the click of a mouse.