BY JOHN K. WILSON
Today is Student Press Freedom Day, which promotes the importance of protecting the rights of student journalists.
Today was also the start of questioning in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, where a key issue has been Trump’s extraordinary efforts to obstruct Congress and silence government employees by banning them from revealing the truth to Congress. Many people realize the dangers of government secrecy and a coverup of presidential misconduct. But few people realize that increasingly college administrators are adopting the same tactics of the Trump Administration and trying to limit what faculty and staff can say.
Campus policies restricting media access are a growing threat to freedom of the press on college campuses, and a dangerous step when we need more transparency in higher education.
One recent example of repressive campus media policies reported on by the Student Press Law Center is at the College of Saint Rose. Since 2017, The Saint Rose Chronicle reports, many employees have stopped speaking to the campus newspaper. In 2019, a new media policy was enacted, and now requests for comment by reporters are rejected with these words: “All media requests should be directed to the marketing department.”
Here is one excuse the College of Saint Rose offered for its media policy: it “is similar to the policies of numerous colleges and universities.” And, sadly, they are absolutely correct. Most private colleges have adopted incredibly restrictive policies on freedom of the press. In fact, many elite universities have media policies worse than the College of Saint Rose, with the media banned from campus without permission and minders required to follow reporters on campus. Still, few colleges have been so successful as the College of Saint Rose in pressuring their employees to be fearful of talking to the press.
That reflects the ongoing threat to academic freedom there. The administration of the College of Saint Rose was censured by the AAUP in 2016 in response to the 2015 termination of 23 tenure-line faculty jobs despite setting records for new student applications and enrollment that fall. The College of Saint Rose had also imposed a new and much more restrictive mass email policy in 2015 that faculty objected to. The repressive media policies there reflect a general lack of respect for free expression.
A group of Saint Rose alumni wrote a letter this month calling on alums to withhold donations to the college until the restrictive “media blockade” is rescinded. In some cases, the advocates of press freedom have been successful in fighting against repressive media policies. The AAUP chapter at Nassau Community College led the way in forcing the reversal of a terrible policy in 2018.
In 2019, student journalists at Loyola University of Chicago persuaded the administration to overturn a restrictive policy that caused a top administrator to demand that student reporters stop contacting employees directly for comment on stories.
But the bad policies are spreading faster than the fixes. This year, I am a fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, studying freedom of the press on campus.
Restrictive campus media policies are not the only threat to freedom of the press on campus, and often not the biggest danger. But they are a growing phenomenon, and one that is easily solved by adopting better policies that recognize how important openness and freedom of the press is to higher education.
Are we kidding? Do we ALWAYS have to drag Donald Trump into EVERY issue, no matter how tenuous the connection? In this case, we’re talking about STUDENT newspapers, not the valid or invalid uses of the Constitutional prerogative of executive privilege. Those matters should be adjudicated by courts, as happened in the case of Richard Nixon, who was compelled to turn over his tapes, etc.
I’m no fan of “the Donald” and I’m all for almost absolute Freedom of the Press for college newspapers, so I agree with the thrust of John K. Wilson’s blog above. As a former faculty adviser to two college newspapers, however, “I object” to the inclusion of “irrelevant and immaterial” political opinion in a discussion of college newspapers.
Since the US President was invoked in the context of free speech, it may be appropriate to raise the 11 December “Law & Order” presidential Executive Order concerning the extension of Title VI rights to students who identify in additional racial categories (and according to an unfortunate NYT op-ed by UChicago Law’s Daniel Hemel, a racial category only for the purpose of qualifying for such legal treatment), and subject to federal financial withholding if universities are judged in violation of the Order. This raises a fascinating question in constitutionally protected free speech on campus environments, including student media platforms. In my view, it also invokes a central position concerning college First Amendment obligations.
Allow me to explain briefly with an example.
The University of Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Maroon, ran a story referring to University president Robert Zimmer, titled, “Zimmer Talks First Amendment, Finance on Davos Panel.” In it, Zimmer is quoted, saying “I keep telling people who congratulate me on defending the First Amendment that it’s not about the First Amendment….As a private University we are not subject to the First Amendment.”
That’s not quite correct.
Trump’s executive orders, by their inherent federal funding conditions, effectively ratify decades-old US case law concerning constitutional free speech, and other rights, on university campuses, especially in Dickey v. Alabama, (Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education, 273 F. Supp. 613 M.D. Ala. 1967) whose constitutional law judgement was centrally determined by “tax-supported colleges or universities.” It does not say “tax-financed” but rather broader federal funding receipts that characterize all higher education institutional capital structures. Moreover, any student or university constituent could, if necessary to defend such rights, constructively pierce pretentions to private university status, given the inherent, and growing, government finance roles in the university complex (including military and defense ones, and in Chicago’s case, its federally compensated administration of Fermi and Argonne Labs, both federal Department of Energy and Department of Defense research installations).
There is no longer (if there ever was) a “private” university, and there are no enforceable exemptions to, or survivable defenses against, constitutional law obligations, including free speech rights, in higher education. Zimmer’s position is not only tenuous, but constructively wrong. At an institutional level, this makes the dissonance between UChicago’s Principles, purporting to ratify free speech, and its ex-ante threat of discipline enforcement in Statute 21 of the UChicago Trustees Restated Articles of Incorporation, specifically against it (under the University’s pretension to private interpretation of free speech), an obvious legal infirmity.
Regards. Matt Andersson, University of Chicago, ’96 (Booth M.B.A.).