How One University Is Punishing Its Students for Writing About Sex

“We got into a little more trouble for posting things like, ‘Why is tuition always going up?’ ‘We are not getting what we’re paying for here at this school,’” she said. “We would go up against roadblocks like people in financial aid wouldn’t talk to us if we wanted to do interviews. Sometimes when there were open meetings they would be like, ‘Oh shit, it’s a Pauw Wow kid. They’re gonna write some terrible stuff.’ It was never this bad when I was in school.”

In a statement, a university spokesperson explained that the newspaper was suspended because it had been operating “without current and approved governing documents.” Because of that (although sources indicate that the organization hasn’t had a full set of governing documents for several years), the budget of the paper was frozen and the recent election of officers was nullified. “A reorganization committee is currently working on updating all of these documents, with input from the SGA, in order to ensure that the publication can operate in the future in accordance with University guidelines. At this time, the committee is working towards the fall 2016 semester to begin publishing again,” the statement read.

“The Pauw Wow is an important part of the University’s history and will continue to be a student activity that is supported by the University. Once the proper governing documents are in place and the budget is reinstated by the SGA, a new editorial board and adviser will be appointed to lead the staff in best practices in news reporting.”

The First Amendment doesn’t apply to newspapers at private institutions, so the students don’t have any sort of legal protection or recourse. The issue at play is whether or not it is a good educational practice for an institution to muzzle its news outlet for a prolonged period of time.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, thinks the move is self-defeating, considering the students could easily start self-publishing online. He also said that, unfortunately, this sort of censorship happens all the time.

“There are some really successful high-end programs that are well-supported by their colleges that are doing amazing stuff,” he said on a phone call with Jezebel, “And then you’ve got other campuses where journalism is regarded as an annoyance and a threat to the college’s positive image.”

“In those places, journalists are always walking on eggshells and looking over their shoulders, waiting for their budget to be yanked or their advisor to be fired.”

LoMonte referenced two cases from last year, in which newspapers at Northern Michigan University and at Iowa’s Muscatine Community College saw their advisors fired in retaliation for articles.

In 2015, student journalists at Fairmont State University in West Virginia experienced a similar outcome after completing a stunningly impressive investigation and exposé into the presence of black mold on campus.

“We went and actually independently tested multiple sites around campus to see if we could find a toxic form of black mold,” said Jacob Buckland, the then-editor-in-chief to a local television station.

WDTV reports that shortly after the investigation, the newspaper became the subject of the school administration’s ire:

The reporters sampled three locations on campus and tow tested positive for black mold. The newspaper then published the story in three installations. Buckland and Wilson hoped the story would encourage the university to take action, but things did not go the way they expected.

“I got administrators coming to me and to my reporters, asking us not to print these articles that showed a negative light on the university,” Buckland said.

The two students then reached out to the school’s Board of Governors to talk about the negative reactions, but communications between the Board and the paper became difficult when school administrators shut down “The Columns” email account, Buckland said.

Additionally, the newspaper’s faculty advisor, Michael Kelley, said he was terminated from a three year contract as a temporary professor at FSU. Wilson and Buckland fear this might be related to their controversial articles.

“I think that ironically, the internet was supposed to make censorship obsolete,” LoMonte continued, “It was supposed to liberate everybody from government censorship and, in fact, at the college and high school level it’s probably made censorship worse because the institutions are now terrified that those newspapers are gonna have indefinite life online.”

While a certain amount of oversight at high school newspapers might be understandable (the staff is under 18 and could need extra guidance), college papers are generally expected to have editorial independence and the same basic rights as professional news outlets.

“Stuff that they were okay with when it was a print newspaper seen by 500 people that went in the garbage the next day, they’re petrified by today,” LoMonte continued.

And the issue of free speech on campuses has only been growing in the national spotlight, largely in relation to topics that might be deemed triggering or offensive. Like when a group of Wesleyan students petitioned to defund the student newspaper unless it instituted a thorough diversity initiative; or when the rugby team at Mary Washington University was suspended over chanting about “fuck[ing] a whore,”; or when a faculty member at Yale argued that students should be allowed to wear offensive costumes; or when a Wheaton College (Illinois) board recommended that a professor be fired for suggesting that Islam and Christianity shared the same god.

A recent Gallup survey found that a good portion of college students feel that the prevailing ideology on campus might prevent them from speaking their mind: While 78 percent of college students said that colleges should expose students to all sorts of speech instead of limiting it to “the furtherance of a positive learning environment,” 54 percent of students reportedly felt that campus culture might prevent some people from speaking openly because others might find it offensive. The survey also noted that most students thought they were able to distinguish between speech that is intentionally offensive from speech that earnestly represents a controversial view.

In 2016, the idea of free speech has been so oft-invoked to defend hate speech and baseless smears that it has been bastardized into meaninglessness—to be sure, it is impossible to extricate that survey’s results from the wide-spread racism and sexism that have always persisted, but recently have been shaken alarmingly loose by the presence of racist and sexist national political campaigns. But in the case of Saint Peter’s, it feels straight forward: Few would argue that a college must protect a student’s rights to make a student feel threatened, but most would agree we all have the right to make each other feel uncomfortable, especially with blatantly well-intentioned content—even if it threatens the moral and ideological stances of an institution.

Monahan told Jezebel that the issue actually managed to spark campus-wide interest in The Pauw Wow but now that they’ve abruptly stopped publishing with no explanation, that interest has waned.

“A lot of people have been coming up to me saying, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’ I think a lot of people are sympathetic, but I think a lot of people also don’t understand the severity of the situation,” she said. “I think our campus, our student body doesn’t quite understand the severity of the situation as a student journalist to be censored so severely in this way.”