At the University of Wisconsin, Madison County, students expressed their outrage at the school paper's satirical bent--which some regard as tasteless and offensive--by setting part of the press run on fire and by stuffing another fifty copies or so down a toilet in a campus men's room.

Newspaper theft is illegal, but hey. Who cares about the law--or about the First Amendment--when there are offensive newspapers that need to be destroyed?

Things are even worse at Stetson University, where the entire staff of the school paper, The Reporter, was fired after the April Fool's edition (known as The Distorter) "went too far." The paper will not be published for the duration of the school year, and the staff were given 15 minutes to remove their belongings from the offices before school administrators changed the locks. The offending material? A school lecture series centered on promoting racial dialogue was spoofed with an article about "a racist Civil War enthusiast drinking beer at a podium. The weekly sex column was written in Ebonics. And the phony advertisements included one for a spray that 'Kills townies dead' and another featuring profanity in giant block letters, 'Because we are allowed to print it.'"

For this, the entire enterprise was summarily shut down--even staff members who had no editorial control over the paper's content were let go. But protecting the tender morals of youth--and donors--from the corrosive effects of tasteless parody matters more than either fairness or a free press. "There's not much in this year's Distorter that you can laugh about," said Michelle Espinosa, the dean of students. "We believe very strongly in students' need for autonomy. But the students do assume responsibility for their editorial decisions."

Espinosa seems not to have realized that censorship is not an effective means of encouraging students to "assume responsibility" for their editorial decisions, and that it is in fact the perfect way to deny students the "autonomy" she acknowledges they "need." The April Fool's issue attracted a lot of complaints from students, faculty, and alumni; had Espinosa truly been concerned with respecting the autonomy of the student paper, she would simply have allowed the staff to deal with the fallout from its editorial choices on its own. But it seems clear enough that Espinosa was more interested in swiftly and definitively silencing a set of voices that she found administratively inconvenient. (One wonders what she would have done if Nicholas De Genova made his "Million Mogadishu" comment on her watch.)

In fairness to the censorious Espinosa, she is not alone: recall the recent cases at Reed, Maryland, and Miami, where student journalists incurred administrative wrath for writing and printing material that either made faculty look bad or mocked academe's sacred cows. And in fairness to the thieves at Wisconsin, they are not alone, either: newspaper theft is a cornerstone of PC campus culture, where all bets are off when something or someone offends.

I wrote Friday that more and more college students are learning more about aggression than they are about reasoned, informed exchange, that in the sloganeering climate of politicized campus culture, too many of today's students are getting educations in the techniques of organized hostility and too few are learning to think rigorously, to articulate their thoughts precisely, and to respect the rights of others to do the same. Watching what happens when college newspapers get on the wrong side of campus orthodoxies provides another window on a huge and growing problem.

Who cares about the law--or about the First Amendment--when there are offensive newspapers that need to be destroyed?
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And, it goes without saying, why should anyone give a thought to the minimum-wage worker who is going to spend an afternoon cleaning 50 newspapers out of a jammed toilet?

>>or about the First Amendment>>

I know, I know, everyone uses the phrase "the First Amendment" when they really mean "the respect you should have for other's rights to free expression", but the actual document and associated law doesn't and shouldn't have any relationship whatsoever with private actors*.

Patrick McKenzie

*Well, there are some fairly narrow exceptions to this, such as where one private actor effectively dominates the public sphere as in a company town, but you get the drift.