Student Journalists Tangle with College Administrators

An Upstate Rival Offers Major Support

Photo by Aditya on Unsplash

Earlier this month, administrators at Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana) halted the physical printing of a special Homecoming edition of the “Indiana Daily Student,” the 158-year-old student newspaper of this original Big Ten school.

Jim Rodenbush, Director of Student Media for IU, was terminated by the university after he refused to remove news content from the Homecoming print edition. Editors fought with the university, citing IU’s Student Media Charter.

On Thursday, the IDS newspaper ran an edition with “Censored” on the cover.

The “Washington Post” reported “The Indiana University student media charter “reaffirms the independence and freedom of student media and says “final content decisions and responsibility rest with duly appointed student editors and managers.” But at student newspapers — as in some professional newsrooms — editorial independence can sometimes be more of a shifting battleground than an immutable reality. According to a 2022 survey by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, at least 60 percent of college newspaper editors reported experiencing at least one instance of administrative censorship in the previous year.”

IU administration told WFYI that the decision was financial.

Student journalists from IU’s long-time upstate rival, Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana), offered to print the Homecoming edition, but the IDS editors turned them down.

“The Exponent’s” (Purdue’s student paper) publisher, Kyle Charters, also told WFYI that he understood why the IDS staff declined the West Lafayette student journalists’ offer to print the special edition. “I think out of fear…that there would be some further retribution from the school.”

The Purdue student journalists ultimately printed a special four-page edition of “The Exponent” and distributed it on the Bloomington campus. The publication was filled with support for IU students, a clear sign of goodwill.

The Purdue journalists have not been without their troubles. Earlier in the year, the university disassociated itself with “The Exponent” and asked that it not be considered a Purdue publication.

Challenges to a publication’s freedom to publish are not new. I pay particular interest as I was once a student journalist. When I was a junior in high school, the administration rejected a new series of classes, Man: A Course of Study (commonly referred to by the acronym MACOS or M.A.C.O.S.). It is an American humanities curriculum project based on the theories of Jerome Bruner. Bruner believed that it was possible to teach children to be more humane and eliminate racism and ethnocentrism by studying another culture closely.

When the student editor of my high school paper wrote an essay explaining why the series should be taught, our journalism advisor pulled the story. The editor printed it on mimeo (1973) and distributed copies throughout the school.

In college, I did not work on the college paper, but rather the magazine-style yearbook. Our journalism curriculum focused strongly on freedom of the press, under the guidance of Dr. Louis Inglehart, a national expert on the subject. Unfortunately, my alma mater is now being sued by a fired program director who posted something on her private Facebook page, which was screen-shotted and put on a site called “Eyes on Education,” sponsored by Todd Rokita, Indiana’s Attorney General.

In summary, journalists are called the fourth estate for a reason. A free press keeps a country free. As we see so many of our norms disappearing before our eyes, we need to have the sense to understand that yelling “fire in a crowded theatre and reporting it exceeds the freedom journalists deserve, but much else — whether we like it or not — deserves to be told.

AI generated

It was gratifying and heartfelt for me to see the student journalists at Purdue University set aside their century-old rivalry to stand up for their peers at Indiana University.

(Of note: my mom graduated from Indiana University in 1955, and my father is a Purdue University graduate, ‘53MA56. Since this was a constant argument in our home, I went to Ball State ‘79MA83 and was delighted to have my own place in the world.)

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