College Media Matters

The student newspaper and yearbook staffs at the University of Portland are being evicted from their offices in the school’s student center to make room for professional staff overseeing a campus religious group. Portland administrators apparently decided upon the shift without consulting students serving on either publication.

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An active petition on Change.org with more than 170 signatures is demanding The Daily Texan reinstate embattled former cartoonist Stephanie Eisner. The University of Texas sophomore was fired late last month after an editorial illustration she created addressing the Trayvon Martin case earned immense criticism from pockets of readers and a bevy of national media attention.

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Only hours after a recent issue of The Signal hit campus newsstands at Georgia State University, students were seen allegedly trashing roughly 250 copies, a Student Press Law Center Report confirms. The most likely motivation for the students’ hasty dump-and-run: reports in the issue on GSU sorority hazing practices and other Greek organization investigations.

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In a fascinating First Amendment and free press ruling, a federal judge has ordered Chicago State University to rehire a student newspaper adviser fired in 2008 after articles critical of the CSU administration were published. According to local news media and a Student Press Law Center report, the school must reinstate Steven Moore to his previous position– executive director of communications– for at least one year and erase negative references within his employment records. Firing him, the federal judge overseeing the case confirmed, was a violation of his free speech rights.

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Roughly two-thirds of the 600 copies of The Courier distributed last week at Monmouth College were allegedly stolen and temporarily trashed possibly in response to a Courier story about a separate alleged theft. The Courier recently ran a piece confirming charges had been dropped against five Monmouth students arrested and implicated in a scheme that involved the theft of a nativity scene and its subsequent placement outside the home of Monmouth’s president.

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A campus rally is planned for Tuesday at Bridgewater State University, in response to an alleged recent attack on an editor of the BSU student newspaper The Comment. As I previously posted, a pair of student-age individuals purportedly punched the Comment staffer out of anger over an opinion piece she wrote supporting gay marriage.

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