It’s a chilling but all-too common scenario: A student writes something controversial in a high school or college newspaper, and pretty soon the faculty adviser to the paper is taking heat from the school’s administration. Some advisers are reassigned, demoted or even fired.
Recently, a few states have passed laws protecting student newspaper advisers from retaliation in such situations, but in most cases, advisers are vulnerable.
Some recent examples:
- Karen Bosley, faculty adviser of the Viking News at Ocean County College in New Jersey, was relieved of her advising duties because, she said, the paper had printed stories critical of the college’s president. Bosley successfully sued the school to get her job back.
- Ron Johnson, adviser to the student paper at Kansas State University, was forced out because of controversial editorial content; his students sued, saying the retaliation was a violation of their First Amendment rights. The case was dismissed on procedural grounds without a ruling on the First Amendment claim.
- San Diego-area high school teacher David Evans is suing after being stripped of his adviser duties in retaliation for his students’ coverage of a controversy involving school administrators and an editorial criticizing the abstinence-only sex education policy.
- According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Board of Trustees at Clark College in Washington state recently rejected the unanimous recommendation of a faculty committee and denied tenure to the adviser of the college’s student newspaper, a move that some feel was meant to squelch dissent against the administration.
Frank D. LoMonte is executive director of the Student Press Law Center, an advocacy group for student press rights. He says that while his group doesn’t keep statistics, “We can say generally that pressuring, transferring, demoting and even firing faculty advisers is a commonplace and insidious form of censorship. We certainly know of dozens of cases of this kind of retaliation but we feel certain there are hundreds of others not coming to our attention.”
LoMonte says his group “takes roughly 2,500 calls and about that many e-mail queries from the public each year, a figure that has remained consistent for 3-4 years now.” Of those 5,000 contacts, about half involve censorship complaints, including retaliatory actions against advisers.
(LoMonte says the most common method of student newspaper censorship is when “a school administrator simply declares ‘you can't publish that article, it will make the school look bad,’ and refuses to distribute the paper unless it is deleted.”)
In fact, LoMonte says statistics on retaliation against student newspaper advisers are unreliable because “the intimidation of teachers is so effective that the vast majority of them do not complain. It is commonplace for administrators not to fire the teacher outright but to strip her of her journalism duties and transfer her to a less desirable assignment.”
But in California, more than a dozen teachers did agree to go public with stories about how they were pressured, demoted, transferred or fired in retaliation for the editorial content of their publications.
