When you write for any publication, especially a student newspaper, all your friends — and I mean all of them — want to give you advice. Most of the comments are along the lines of staff illiteracy and idiocy — people like to complain.
Despite the well-meaning remarks, they are rarely something I haven’t heard and I press onward relatively unaffected.
There is only one piece of advice — from my friends at least — that has ever caused me serious contemplation. A classmate of mine, Greg, remarked that he missed the First Amendment on the Viewpoint page. For those of you who don’t know, the First Amendment used to be printed next to the staff box on the Viewpoint page.
I’ve thought back on that comment often this semester as my First Amendment right to Freedom of the Press has gotten tangled amongst the University bureaucracy.
Almost all of the senior level administrators at the University will spare a couple minutes of their day for Technician. The paper and its staff attempts to give their message a fair and open forum, it makes sense for them to talk to us — regardless of the fact that a “no comment” looks bad in print.
The problems come in when you try to talk to lower-level administrators, especially resident advisors and resident directors, who are under some sort of hypnosis that has led them to believe they can’t talk to the press. Despite assurances from University Housing Director Susan Grant that there is no University Housing policy prohibiting them from talking to the press, I have repeatedly been told by RDs and RAs that they can’t talk without Director Grant’s permission.
Further elaboration: at the start of the semester I attempted to talk to several RAs at Bragaw Hall about their thoughts on the hall renovations. I successfully talked to a couple, who apparently didn’t know “the rules,” before I was told to leave by the residence director. The First Amendment should have protected my rights as a member of the press to freely interview students about their thoughts on the renovations; the RD didn’t see it the same way.
A couple months later I attempted to interview RDs and RAs for an editorial about sex in dorms. None of the RDs I contacted would talk to me, citing University Housing policy — there is no policy to that extent. Instead I was referred to Housing’s assistant directors who had no first-hand knowledge on the topic.
I was unable to fully report on the good work Housing has done to reduce roommate problems because RAs and RDs — University students — were unwilling to talk about their personal experiences.
I finally lost my sanity when I heard the story of Tim Chapman, the editor in chief of The Breeze, James Madison University’s student newspaper. JMU’s judicial services issued charges of trespassing, disorderly conduct and noncompliance with an official order for failing to leave a dorm while he was reporting on a Peeping Tom incident. Chapman was with a dorm resident as a guest, as the university requires, and followed the instructions — though moronic — of the RA and RD.
He was exercising his First Amendment rights and is being prosecuted because of it. When I talked with Chapman, he told me the issue comes back to access and University administrators, in this case an RA and RD, not knowing their own policies.
He has been fouled and so has every other journalist. JMU and many other universities, including N.C. State, seem to think the First Amendment shouldn’t apply on campus.
Administrators have a right not to talk, but no policy, official or unofficial, should limit the right to Freedom of Speech by administrators or Freedom of the Press to student journalists. Universities need a wake-up call.
