Every year, across the country, there are regular dust-ups on campus about what the student newspaper decides to print. Every year, across the country, individuals and groups take great offense to the tone, or the content, or the editorials, or the photography, or the cartooning, of the student paper, and raise hell in their insistence on restitution. The form this insistence takes can range from demands for apologies to demands for punishment and censorship. It's common practice for outraged groups of students to steal entire press runs of papers that print stories or opinions that offend them. It's also common practice for university administrations to look the other way when that occurs.

The periodic, almost ritualized outrage about the politics and ethics of students newspapers expresses the tense standoff between the advocates of free speech and the would-be censors who populate every campus. When print runs are stolen or when a coalition of outraged students demands that a paper be shut down, or insists that its staff be forced to apologize--or even to attend sensitivity training--for causing offense, student publications become a lightning rod for clarifying one of the defining schisms on campus today. The gap between those who see the campus as a bastion of unfettered inquiry and those who see it as a utopian experiment in social re-ordering, between those who believe in free expression and those who believe in protecting sensitivities, is uniquely and disturbingly visible in such moments, not least because student publications are one of the few campus entities that will publicly and vociferously defend freedom of speech and freedom of the press when the sensitivity police set about trying to censor them, or even shut them down.

That gap is not visible at Mesa State College, where the student paper recently caved in, completely, abjectly, and absolutely, to the outraged accusations and demands of Native American students. Last weekend, Mesa State defeated the University of Dakota's Fighting Sioux football team. And last week, The Criterion, the student paper, ran a story about the game entitled "Mavs scalp Sioux 31-24." The word "scalp" was not well received by Native American students on campus. "This really hits home big-time with us," a psychology major who is Lakota Sioux told the Associated Press. As a student of Cree descent explained it, "The person who wrote this has no idea what goes into that word." Outraged students cried foul, and the paper agreed that in choosing a verb that associates Native Americans with scalping--indeed, that appears to threaten them with scalping--it committed a heinously offensive, deeply insensitive, and racist act (worth noting: white students at the school don't seem to have raised a protest about the fact that they are the ones cast as the evil scalpers by the headline).

The editor-in-chief of the paper and the News editor are publicly eating crow while at the same time subtly seeking to pass the blame for the unforgivable word choice onto others at the paper:

"It was definitely not intentional," editor-in-chief Natalie Gaffey said Thursday. "I think the bottom line is, even big papers make mistakes. Ultimately this is a learning experience for us."

Gaffey wrote the story about the game, but a sports editor wrote the headline, she said. News editor Megan Fromm said she and Gaffey proofread the paper and didn't catch the controversial word.

"To use that word is offensive and even as a person who isn't of any minority descent ... it's offensive," Fromm said. "It's something that never should have happened, but that doesn't excuse it."

Fromm and Gaffey said they didn't blame students and faculty for the outrage.

"They should get mad," Fromm said.

Lest you think I over-read and over-reach, consider the response by the paper's faculty advisor, also quoted in the AP report:

The faculty adviser to the paper, Morris Brown, also apologized to the Indian student club. He said the paper would print a front-page retraction.

Brown cited his status as the only black professor on campus as reason for the club members to believe his apology.

"If I were white, yeah, you could be skeptical, but as a black man and a brother, I know how you feel," Brown said. "If I were Caucasian, I wouldn't expect you to listen."