Collegian gives thanks for ‘Dale’s hands-off administration

Recent news has demonstrated that free speech should not be taken for granted—even in the United States.

In a Feb. 21 decision, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Hosty v. Carter, in which three student journalists at Governors State University in Illinois sued their dean over the issue of censorship.

According to a February 2006 Student Press Law Center LegalAlert, the dean “demanded that she or another university official be allowed to read and approve the student newspaper, the Innovator, prior to publication.”

The Supreme Court’s decision is significant because it upholds a 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 2005 ruling that could give university administrators in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin the authority to censor student newspapers.

Governors State University is facing an additional lawsuit from student journalists who claim that the university placed a faculty member in the position of editor-in-chief, in addition to other First Amendment violations.

Apparently these administrators do not believe that engaging in investigative or watchdog journalism—a staple of any news agency—is appropriate in an academic setting.

Fortunately, the Hillsdale College administration knows better.

Contrary to popular rumor, The Collegian is an uncensored publication and enjoys the right of free press.

Although we are largely funded by Hillsdale College, we run free of intrusive administrative oversight.

Instead, the administration, out of the desire to create responsible journalists of integrity, allows The Collegian to be entirely student-run.

Every week, it is students—not administrative officials and not Dow Journalism Program advisers—who choose story ideas, report on issues relevant to campus, take photographs, design pages and make editorial decisions.

Like any newspaper, we occasionally refrain from publishing certain details that could put The Collegian into unnecessary legal situations.

For this reason, there will always be those who persist in denigrating our newspaper as nothing more than another public relations device. If this were the case, however, or if we were nothing more than a student newsletter, we doubt we currently would be the best weekly college newspaper in Michigan.

Collegian stories do in fact occasionally have negative effects on administrative efforts —and yet the administration insists on remaining hands-off, remembering that a need for censorship would mean they had failed to train conscientious journalists.

If only the student journalists at Governors State University could be so lucky.