Freedom of the press on campus has garnered plenty of attention with incidents at the University of Missouri and Wesleyan University. Yet the two incidents “are hardly the only examples,” warns Observer.
At Mizzou, a student photographer was pushed away from covering student protesters by former professor Melissa Click, who has since been fired and charged with assault. The Wesleyan Argus faced controversy and defunding threats after publishing a critical article about Black Lives Matter.
Censorious urges are widespread, as 40 percent of high school and college students report dealing with censorship, according to Attorney Advocate Adam Goldstein with the Student Press Law Center (SPLC).
Recent court cases, such as O’Brien v. Welty, have made campuses less open to speech and expression. The 9th Circuit Court released an opinion which allowed the free speech case of student Neil O’Brien to go forward, but ruled that questioning professors with a video camera could be interpreted as intimidating. While some considered the case a win for students, it “may be dangerous for campus speech” and journalism , the SPLC warned.
The ramifications the SPLC speaks of are troubling. “Some colleges tend to view it as a creative test. If I come up with the most unusual method of censorship then it’s not really censorship,” Goldstein noted with original emphasis.
Steven Glick, publisher of the Claremont Independent, had to resign from his job at Pomona College’s writing center because he felt he was being targeted for his political beliefs. His faculty supervisors were concerned about his involvement with the conservative student paper.
Colleges aren’t the only ones who feel the need to get creatively censor. Student newspapers themselves face the dilemma of self-censorship, even for independent papers. “There has been a chilling effect: Topics like race, sexual assault and Israeli-Palestinian relations often receive extra scrutiny before they are committed to print,” Observer notes.
Fortunately, Observer spoke with student editors who advocated for running pieces even if others may not agree. This includes the CU Independent at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Lantern at the Ohio State University, the Daily Free Press at Boston University, and the Oakland Post at Oakland University in Michigan.
About the decision for the Oakland Post to publish an opinion piece arguing that the United States should not accept Syrian refugees, editor-in-chief Kristen Davis wrote:
Many staff members “lost their minds” and tried to stop Davis from publishing the piece, she noted. “It was a conservative viewpoint, and they didn’t want it published, but when they run the other opinion they didn’t mind it.”
