In late October 2000, an administrator at south suburban Governors State University called the company that printed the school newspaper and ordered it to stop publication.
The reasons given by Dean of Student Affairs Patricia Carter: No one from the university had reviewed the paper for journalistic quality and it may have contained “grammatical errors.”
That action prompted a legal battle between the student editors and the university over freedom of speech and alleged censorship by the administration that will be played out today in a federal appeals court in Chicago.
College administrators, constitutional law experts, journalism groups and students at other colleges across the country are closely watching the case.
College journalists at public schools and free-press advocates worry that a ruling on behalf of the university will choke off their First Amendment right to free expression in the often-lively campus press.
In particular, they fear a 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision from a case in Hazelwood, Mo., that gave wide powers to high school principals to control student publications will be broadened to the college level.
“The [Governors State] argument is to extend that ruling to college papers,” said Jim Killam, president of the Illinois College Press Association and adviser to the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University. “We find that outrageous.”
After editor-in-chief Jeni Porche and managing editor Margaret Hosty took over the semimonthly Innovator in May 2000, the paper at the 9,000-student college in University Park started ruffling feathers with investigative journalism and criticism of faculty and administration.
“We didn’t pull any punches,” Hosty said.
The Innovator’s last issue, published Oct. 31, 2000, prompted an irate statement from university President Stuart Fagan.
“The Innovator did not enlighten nor did it inform the GSU community through thoughtful, accurate and fair reporting,” Fagan wrote, without citing a particular example.
“Instead of fairness in reporting, the reader was presented with an angry barrage of unsubstantiated allegations that essentially – and unfairly – excoriated some members of the university faculty and administration (myself included).”
Just as that issue had been completed and distributed, Dean Carter told the newspaper’s printer, Regional Publishing, that the Innovator must be reviewed by a school official before more issues were published. Since then, the Innovator, founded in 1971, hasn’t been published.
In January 2001, Hosty and Porche sued the university administration, charging their First Amendment rights had been violated.
Federal Judge Suzanne B. Conlon on Nov. 13, 2001 dismissed the students’ claims against the school’s trustees and several administrators, with the exception of Carter.
Today, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Carter’s appeal. A ruling could take months.
The Arlington, Va.-based Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed a brief on behalf of the students, along with 11 other college and professional media organizations.
Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, said the Governors State case had “enormous” implications for college students and faculty beyond the 7th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
“It will be a first-of-its-kind decision,” Goodman said. The Illinois attorney general’s office rejects the contention that the case represents a challenge to freedom of the press on college campuses.
“That’s the way people are framing it, but I’m not sure that’s really correct,” said Assistant Attorney General Mary Welsh, who represents Carter.
If the judges rule against the students, Welsh said, colleges that want to maintain an independent press can set a clear policy that administrators won’t review student publications.
“They can create a non-Hazelwood paper if they want,” Welsh said.
Carter’s actions, Welsh said, did not violate the student’s First Amendment rights and were not improper.
Meanwhile, at Governors State, a new newspaper, the Phoenix, started publishing three months ago, university spokesman Charles Connolly said.
Connolly said the administration could not comment on the Hosty case. But he said President Fagan gave an interview to the first edition of the Phoenix in which he “restated his belief in a free press.”