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Printer-Friendly ModeNewspaper censorship wrong
August 25, 2005 —
In October of 2000, Dean Patricia Carter of Governors State University in Illinois, told the editors of the school's paper that they could not go to print until she had approved of the paper's content. Appalled by Carter's blatant disregard of the First Amendment, the editors of The Innovator took Carter to court. When the decision came back in this seemingly open-and-shut case, a panel of three judges somehow found in favor of Carter's demand for censorship. A few technicalities vacated the decision and the case was then examined by the entire 11 judge panel. Again, the majority of judges sided with Carter, essentially deciding that the founders of our constitution had no idea what they were doing when they envisioned a free press.
Experts close to the case stated that essentially the decision means college students have no more right to editorial decisions than high school editors who need administrative approval before printing. They mentioned the Supreme Court decision in 1998 that ruled high school students have fewer First Amendment rights because they are younger, more emotionally immature and more likely to be influenced by outside views. But there is no disputing that college papers should not be monitored by their respected institutions anymore than the New York Times should be regulated by the U.S. government.
If the editors and staff of The Innovator are old enough to vote on changes to our constitution then they should be protected by it as well. To say college students are emotionally immature and more likely to be influenced by outside views is to ignore the fact that there are just as many thirty year olds with that description and just as many young people who believe so strongly in issues that no one could ever influence their opinion.
What could be most disturbing about this case is that the call for censorship came from an institute of higher learning; that the ones who teach us about our freedoms are the ones trying to take them away. We are confident that SVSU administrators would never demand the final say in what we publish. However, if the adminstration did try to pursue this policy, we would exhaust every legal option at our disposal to keep the press free, and the First Amendment alive.
The one positive to all of this though has been that no other public cases of a university trying to regulate a college press have surfaced. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened or that it won't. But one time is too many.
The irony in all of this is that Carter said she was doing what was best for her university. The Innovator had published some articles critical of professors and members of the administration and Carter wanted to prevent further negative press. Yet rather than investigate the paper's claims or try to correct the issues the paper was critical about, she instead chose to violate the constitution of the United States of America and get involved in a case that spit on the graves of the forefathers who created this country.