In a 7-4 en banc decision today
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled today that it is constitutional for college administrators at a public university to pull funding from a school-subsidized student newspaper based on its editorial content.
[Okay, technically, it's a little narrower than that: lawgeeks, they held that any constitutional protections for college student newspaper speech are not clearly established, and therefore qualified immunity protects individual defendants from damages.]
The case concerned the student newspaper at Governors State University in Illinois. After publishing news articles criticizing the school's Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the University's administration issued statements accusing the paper of irresponsible and defamatory journalism.
When the paper refused to retract factual statements that the administration deemed false, or even to print the administration's responses, the Dean of Student Affairs and Services called the newspaper's printer and told it not to print any issues that she had not reviewed and approved in advance. The student editors refused to accept such conditions, and the paper ceased to exist.
In its holding today (reversing favorable prior decisions), the 7th Circuit determined that the Supreme Court's decision in Hazelwood, which held that high school administrators could censor a student newspaper it funded, could conceivably apply equally in the university setting. And because the Supreme Court has yet to clearly protect university student newspapers, you can't hold someone personally liable for establishing such rights.
[Quick background: the doctrine of 'qualified immunity' basically says this -- a state employee can't face trial for violating someone's constitutional rights if it was not reasonable for that person to realize that the action would, in fact, violate the Constitution. The right first has to be "clearly established" to give them fair notice.]
This stinks, but there is a better answer: if you're at a college newspaper, be financially self-sufficent. Be aggressive with your advertising department, because, otherwise, the hand that feeds you could bite you as well.
More background here and here