College press must not be censored

Thiel College, a school located 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, made headlines this week -… Thiel College, a school located 70 miles north of Pittsburgh, made headlines this week – even attracting attention from the Associated Press – when the editor of the school’s student newspaper claimed the administration was censoring it. The details of the story are somewhat muddled, but the moral is simple – for a newspaper to maintain its quality, it must be free to report facts.

Problems began for Thiel’s paper, The Thielensian, when Dan West, the faculty adviser, resigned. According to Nathan Shrader, the paper’s student editor, West resigned under pressure from the administration after the paper had published articles criticizing the school. In response, Thiel College’s president, Lance Masters, said while critical coverage could affect the adviser’s tenure, it was unlikely that it would, and West had nothing to fear.

But Shrader believes that when offered a choice of either censoring the paper or losing his tenure, West opted to resign his post. After West’s resignation, the administration halted production to ensure that nothing libelous was printed in the absence of an adviser.

Ideally, the student newspaper should be to some extent self-sufficient. But at a small school like Thiel, that’s not always possible. So if the school owns or oversees the production of the student newspaper, it is vital that administrators allow student journalists some room to work. The paper will not be reliable if it only reports on positive aspects of the school, so it must be free to record the negatives without pressure from the college.

Among other critical stories, The Thielensian ran a feature about how faculty salaries at the school were lower than average while administrative salaries were above average, prompting the alleged pressure on West.

If the adviser was pressured into resigning, Shrader and everyone else at The Thielensian have a serious complaint against their administrators. But if the whole situation was just a misunderstanding, as Masters argues, the school should investigate as to why the paper’s adviser was so afraid of losing his tenure. Reporting on negative aspects of the school is a vital part of student journalism.

To deny a student paper the right to criticize its school is to make the paper void, and any adviser should be able to rest on that fact without fear of punishment.