BY HANK REICHMAN

On September 6, 2018, the student newspaper at the University of North Alabama (UNA), The Flor-Ala, reported that the school’s administration had improperly withheld public documents about the resignation of the vice president of student affairs.  A week later, the student journalists, members of the communications department, and The Flor-Ala media adviser Scott Morris met with University Provost Ross Alexander.  According to Morris, the Student Press Law Center reports, Alexander was angry about the article and the meeting was tense.  On September 26, the provost informed Morris that the student media adviser job description had been changed, and Morris is now unqualified for his position.

“I think it was just a quick knee-jerk reaction,” Morris said of the Provost’s decision, “it was a way to replace me.”

In Fall 2016, the AAUP, the College Media Association (CMA), the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center issued a report, Threats to the Independence of Student Media.  The report noted, “When college or university administrators are disturbed by aggressive student journalism, faculty advisers sometimes pay with their jobs.  Examples abound in public and private institutions alike.”  The report recounted incidents in Indiana, Iowa, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, and West Virginia.  In addition, a 2016 CMA survey “revealed that over a three-year period more than twenty media advisers who had not previously shared their stories reported suffering some degree of administrative pressure to control, edit, or censor student journalistic content.”

At UNA the rewritten job description changed Morris’s position to a tenure track faculty position requiring a Ph.D., which Morris doesn’t have.  This effectively eliminated Morris’s job.  Morris has worked in journalism for more than two decades and has held the adviser position at UNA since 2014.

On November 29, the UNA Student Publications Board issued a statement that voiced concerns about the change.  “The board believes students are best served by the current system under which they are advised by, and exposed to the guidance of an experienced media professional who is dedicated to this important role,” the statement said.  “We believe students’ engagement with an adviser with extensive experience in the profession is invaluable to their development.”  Glenn Stephens, chair of the board, charged that the administration has not seen fit to at least have some discussion about the situation.  He said the administration never consulted the board before the removal of Morris.

The board’s statement followed the November 26 announcement that the CMA, which represents more than 600 media advisers in the United States, had censured the university.  CMA President Chris Evans said the group had been trying to work with UNA to find a compromise where Morris could remain as adviser, but the university was unresponsive.

“If college officials decided to remove the adviser as punishment for something that students published, then that reeks of retaliation for Constitutionally protected student speech,” said Evans.

The censure followed an investigation by CMA’s First Amendment Advocacy Committee.  Their report laid out the following timeline:

• Sept. 6: The Flor-Ala published an article titled “Administration denies public records, in direct violation of attorney general opinion.”  The paper had been looking into the resignation of the vice president of student affairs and the banishment of a professor from university property.  The journalists met significant resistance from the university.
• Sept. 13: Just one week after the publication of the article, UNA Provost Ross Alexander met with student editors, adviser Morris and the communications department chairman, Butler Cain.  According to attendees, the provost complained that the report had “several inaccuracies.”  The provost and chairman described the provost’s demeanor as “concerned.”  Morris called it “angry,” and the students characterized it as “frustrated.”
• Sept. 26: The dean told the adviser that the provost would terminate his non-faculty position and replace it with a tenure-track faculty position requiring a Ph.D.  This would result in an effective job termination for Morris, a longtime journalist who does not have a doctorate.

“The provost called in the editors and advisers to complain about content, then almost immediately the provost unilaterally eliminated Morris’ existing position, without even bothering to consult the communications department or publications board,” said Bob Bergland, chair of the First Amendment Advocacy Committee.

The administration claimed that the decision had in fact been in preparation well before these events, but the CMA investigation said that “administrators could provide absolutely no correspondence, reports or materials indicating they were thinking of changing this position before publication of the Sept. 6 article.”

“It is CMA’s firm position that any discussion about changing basic job requirements for such an important position would have produced a significant paper trail, but university administrators could not provide a single such document, despite their stated efforts to do so,” Evans said.  CMA’s investigator spoke to dozens of sources at the college and tried to bring all parties to the table to resolve their conflicts, Evans said.  However, university administrators refused to enter into serious discussions.  Instead, the school quickly began a national job search in order to replace Morris.

The Flor-Ala reported that the university administration “issued a reminder to the UNA faculty and staff Oct. 25 about an in-house media protocol, which suggests faculty and staff do not speak to the media without the administration’s examination of all inquiries beforehand.”  This reminder was intended to limit student press access to university officials, effectively serving as a further limitation on students’ ability to report on the university, Evans said.

In recent years, CMA has censured four schools, including UNA. The censure will be lifted if the school reworks its policies to stop meddling with student media and their First Amendment rights.  Evans does not see that happening any time soon, however.  “We would like to work with them, but we don’t see them working with us,” he said.

In an embarrassingly belligerent but lame December 6 statement to the UNA faculty senate, President Kenneth Kitts called the censure an “effort to conflate an academic decision… with an attack on the First Amendment.”  He told the faculty that

There was and is no retaliation involved in this case.  The decision to move the media adviser’s position from a staff line to a faculty line has been three years in the making, and that decision was driven by Dean Carmen Burkhalter.  The fact that an article critical of the administration appeared in The Flor-Ala that same month was coincidental.  . . .

Now let’s turn our attention to actions taken by the College Media Association.  It is important to understand what this organization is and what it is not.  CMA is not a licensing body, not a regulatory body, not an accrediting body.  It is an advocacy group, and its formal name on business documentation provides some evidence of the primary group for whom it advocates: College Media Advisers Inc.

Reading this last paragraph I just had to laugh.  How many times in the AAUP’s more than 100-year history have we heard similar language from administrators?  AAUP Committee A members and staff in our department of academic freedom, tenure and governance are quite familiar with college and university administrations that refuse to cooperate with investigations and even question the association’s right to conduct them.  There’s an old saying, “A stuck pig squeals.”

UNA faculty members were skeptical of the president’s claim.  “My recollection of what was discussed before does not match what’s being put out,” said journalism professor and Student Publications Board member Jim Martin.  “The three-year discussion that they keep talking about was only a discussion about moving from oversight of (former Student Affairs Vice President) David Shield’s office to the Department of Communications.  Martin said the board created a resolution to move student media and its advisement from Student Affairs to the College of Arts and Sciences but changing the structure of its advisement was never a part of the discussion.

“Their excuse is ‘we are doing this for the reaccreditation,’ which does not seem to be following the facts,” Martin said. “It seems to me that someone is trying to rewrite the narrative to make it appear that this has been planned ahead of time.”

Gregg Pitts, former chair of the communications department, said if the university claimed discussions to change the adviser position to a tenure-track line began in late 2014, it did not begin with him.  “If anyone asserts that I made this request, I would describe their claim as false,” Pitts said.  “At best, a wrong conclusion and at worst, a distortion attributed to me because I am no longer at the university and part of the discussions.”  Pitts sent a memo to university administration in late 2014, to affirm he believed it was time to move student media to the Department of Communications, but the memo did not recommend changing the status of the student media adviser.

“It’s embarrassing to watch this group of administrators make so many bad decisions on such a public stage,” commented the deposed media adviser Morris.

“The best media advisers, often journalists themselves, are staunch defenders of their students’ free press rights.  They should not be punished for asserting themselves in this role,” declared the AAUP in the 2016 joint statement on student media.  “Media advisers are, above all else, educators who seek to train young journalists in the practice of ethical, thorough journalism.  Typically, they are not producers of college or university journalism and should not be expected—or allowed—to interfere in the editorial process.  An adviser who writes for the student newspaper without attribution or who rewrites material in the student newspaper is akin to a professor who rewrites an essay for a student instead of offering suggestions for improvement.  An administrator who demands control of student media content is akin to a college or university official who dictates the content of a student essay.”