At Berkeley, students who don't like what the Daily Californian prints steal the paper so others can't read it. But at Loyola, the president himself ensures that The Maroon doesn't print stories to which he objects.

The bare facts: Scott Frederickson, head of Loyola's music department, abruptly leaves his job a mere week after appearing with Loyala president Bernard Knoth at a news conference; Frederickson will not say why he left Loyola, but he did publish a darkly insinuating piece in The Maroon several days before he left; in that piece he wrote, ìIn recent weeks, I have experienced unfortunate actions from people whom I respected and thought were friends. This has caused me to contemplate the karmic law of cause and effect,î and in another, ìI hope my ëfriendsí will keep an eye over their shoulder. The karmic principle of ëwhat goes around comes aroundí is on the wayí î; a team of student reporters from The Maroon investigated Frederickson's departure, concluded that he had been fired, and wrote a piece entitled, "Chair's firing shrouded in secrecy"; Father Knoth found out about the piece the day before it was to run; Knoth first ordered all references to Frederickson's alleged firing to be removed from the piece; minutes later, he changed his mind and quashed the entire story.

Knoth's rationale: ìIt was well-written, it was well-edited, but it was in the end conjecture. ... It certainly was misleading ó and from my point of view inflammatory ó and because it was just conjecture and the last issue of the year, I honestly felt it was inappropriate to publish it.î Knoth also said that it was not appropriate for The Maroon to delve into personnel issues, and that in his eight years at Loyola he had only quashed one other article.

The response from The Maroon's student editor-in-chief, as told to The Chronicle of Higher Education: "He could have handled it better than he did. I wouldn't have had a problem adapting the story, to be more accurate. It's almost like having the mayor of your city be the publisher of your paper."

And the response from Mike Hiestand, a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center: "The bigger question is not whether [quashing the story] was legal or not legal, but if it was right or wrong. ... The Maroon is supposed to be a newspaper, not an extension of Loyola's public relations office."

The Chronicle also notes that the Loyola student handbook says that "in order to operate effectively, [the student newspaper] is to be a free and independent voice acting in the best interest of the university in pursuit of truth."

So what did The Maroon put in the space where the story was supposed to be? It's worth the hassle of the required registration to find out.

Well, we could use a bit more information, but it does look pretty clear already that the university president acted outrageously. The offending article sounds as though it wasn't in any way destructive - just a recounting of rumors about the professor's departure, and this is a perfectly reasonable sort of thing to publish.

As is often the case in these stories, both characters look way weird -- the "dark" piece in which Frederickson shares his "prioritizing" philosophy with us is bizarre, as are the comments and activities of the president as recounted by the students trying to talk to him.

My perfectly groundless guess is that Frederickson did something morally unsuitable to a Catholic school -- that this music promoter is a wee bit too hip, perhaps, for his surroundings -- and that the president has been looking for a way to have him go quietly. Or maybe the president has suddenly come to regret the curricular decision to ditch Aquinas for Quincey Jones.

I'm sorry, Erin, but your analogy is flawed. The university president is in fact legally the publisher of the newspaper, and publishers certainly pull stories they don't like.

Interestingly, here's a brief from another web site regarding a similar incident in the real world: "the Boston Globe, owned by the New York Times Co., spiked a column by "Boring Broadsheet boy wonder Brian McGrory" because McGrory was critical of Raines for the way he mismanaged the case of erstwhile reporter Jayson Blair."

Judging from the story as it was reported in the local New Orleans paper, Loyola's president was probably acting on advice of counsel, as it appears that the facts of the case as reported are extremely prejudicial to the rights of the person involved.

Contrary to the insinuation by Purcell, the facts as reported--although not by you--suggest something extremely serious--they certainly go far beyond ordinary termination procedures.

And before you or some other poster goes ballistic on legal issues, let me remind you all that Louisiana is probably the most litigious state in the union, and its legal system, based on the Napoleonic Code, differs drastically from all the other states.

jdrax:

The analogy isn't mine--it's that of the student editor.

I'm not sure what facts you say I am suppressing--the Times-Picayune piece covers the same essential territory as the pieces I linked to above. It's not possible from the stories to sort out why Frederickson left his job or what it was about the story that led Knoth to spike it. That's why I didn't speculate, and simply laid out a summary of events as they had already been reported in Louisiana and in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Well, sure, publishers CAN pull stories they don't like because (as in the Howell Raines case you cite) they're not flattering to the publishers... The question is whether they should. I don't know what the rest of jdrax's dark language is about -- were we about to find out that the professor in question is the devil incarnate?

Re: Father Knoth

As Bugs Bunny used to say, "What a maroon." What with all the wimpy, New Age prelates representing various religious orders in this country, it's nice to see the stylings of an old-fashioned RC martinet with a bent for transparently false explanations. It seems like only yesterday that one of several nuns in my past was swinging from the heels with her ruler, aiming at my outstretched hand. But I grow nostalgic.

jdrax: Correction from the real world: the Globe has in fact now published the critical column by McGrory that you mention. In the real world, when people find out that your paper's management is in the business of censoring negative stories about itself, you start uncensoring real fast, before your newspaper loses all of its readers.

i'll keep this short & to the point because nobody wants to read the half-coherent ramblings of a person who's just ingested a whole tub of icecream & is about to start bouncing around, tigger-the-tiger like, viz. insane blood sugar levels:

it's berkeley.

par for the course.

the end.

(curtsey)