For those of you attending college campuses and reading college newspapers, prepare for a slight shift in what graces your front page.
Until now, college journalists enjoyed the same First Amendment freedoms as their professional counterparts. But in a case watched closely by press experts, the Seventh Circuit ruled, on June 20 in Hosty v. Carter, for defendant and Governors State University dean Patricia Carter, who in October 2000 told the printer for the school newspaper The Innovator (staffed by grad students and undergrads) not to run off any more issues until she had seen them first. (The paper had published stories about lackluster professors and what it felt was an antagonistic administration.) Editors Margaret Hosty and Jeni Porche, both graduate students at the Illinois public university at the time, and writer Steven Barba, said that amounted to unconstitutional censorship and took Carter to court.
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0531,education3,66452,12.html
Needless to say, they lost the case. And the result may be a startling new way in which newspapers on college campuses are run. The crux of the issue is that "[t]he majority's conclusion flows from an incorrect premise--that there is no legal distinction between college and high school students" and therefore, due to the students' immature and impressionable nature, they are not capable of running a paper in a mature fashion. Perhaps coming from the University of Texas, home of one of the nations leading college newspapers The Daily Texan, my perspective is a bit skewed. I have to admit, fart jokes and naked pictures of faculty are generally absent from their pages. Criticism of the administration for wasted student moneys, unethical business practices, misuse of college resources, and general partisan politics however is common place. The Daily Texan serves many purposes on campus, but one of its most important functions is to keep the feet of the administration to the fire and keep people at least generally honest by informing the student body of where its dollars are going. If our President were to suddenly have executive editorial power over what goes into and comes out of the student paper, we suddenly have a serious conflict of interests.
Of course, this particular threat to freedom of press is rather limited and cuts both ways. A highly liberal administration can censor conservative opinions just as fast as a conservative campus can squelch a liberal voice. Is this a bad thing? Is it something mainstream America should even be worried about? Are small-town newspapers next? Tabloids? Papers created, run, or patroned by young people in general? Or is this purely a University problem that the schools have to figure out on their own.
Do you even care?