The recent actions taken against university and college newspapers should bother everyone. It won’t, of course, starting with the attitude among too many that these are not “real” newspapers. They’re student papers and even when the students in question are well into their twenties, there’s this notion that they’re kids. They’re still in school, after all, how mature can they be?
We learn best by doing.
I entered high school in 1969. The school had a paper and I wanted to be on it. Took me a good deal of the year, but as a freshman I joined the staff.
1969-70. Vietnam, the counterculture, campus protests, the civil rights movement, and 1970 was the year of Kent State. I walked in among people my age or a year or two older who were involved in the issues of the day. They weren’t running a paper that was exclusively concerned with what went on in the school. There were people on the staff who had strong opinions. Whether the “adults” around us admitted it or not, these were not “kids.”
So immediately I was there for the controversies. And there were many over the four years of my involvement. That first year the paper had published a multi-part series on drugs at our high school. The administration went ballistic. “There are no drugs at this school.” Really? Where were they? When the paper won an award for that story, suddenly the administration was “so proud of our students.” It was a master class in hypocrisy.
We had trouble keeping subscriptions up, so we petitioned for permission to sell ads. When one of the first ones we ran was from Planned Parenthood, the Mrs. Grundy Committee was on us again.
During my time, we were in regular conflict with an administration that disapproved. They wanted no controversy. They did not wish to explain things to the PTA. They got angry phone calls from upset parents. Every time they tried to suppress us, we felt we were doing something right.
What drove me to distraction was their refusal to deal with us. The students. Our hapless sponsor got all the heat. Why couldn’t he control us? Why was he allowing such things to be published? Wasn’t he aware of how bad all this made the school look? They berated him as if he could just keep us after school for punishment. Of course, he was in a bit of a moral quandry, since he was not all that much older than we were and sympathized with the views we thought were important. The administration just wanted us to do stories about Homecoming or who was dating who or the new teachers just hired. You know, social pages stuff. Actual journalism, well, we were kids.
I personally got into hot water over two things I wrote. I did an editorial about the guy drumming up trouble over the harp seal hunts on the St. Lawrence. He showed up to tell us about it. He was fundraising, too. I did some research and ended up asking what he expected the United States to do about it, since the St. Lawrence, in the section where and when the hunts took place, was international waters. Maybe we should do something about the importation of the products made from the fur. It was critical. I questioned his tactics, not his cause. I drew the personal ire of a particular teacher. It was messy and I ended up having to find a way to stay out of her class, since she more or less promised to punish me for having the temerity to criticize someone who had written a book.
The issue triggered a larger discussion. It served a few purposes. It advanced the dialogue, which, if this teacher had had her way, would have died aborning.
The other trouble was more dramatic for me personally. There was a budget issue that led to the suggestion that we had to choose between new uniforms for the varsity football team and band. Band. They were considering cutting band so the boys could have their uniforms. I thought that was absurd and said so and pointed out the academic benefits between the two programs and which was more likely to produce life successes. For my trouble five or six guys from the varsity team crowded into the newspaper office and tried to throw me out the window. We were on the second floor, but it was more like a three story drop. A number of teachers and security guards had to intervene. Lesson learned about the absolutely juvenile reaction of some people when a sacred cow is poked.
I have loathed football ever since.
But the question was thrown again at our sponsor, why did he allow that editorial to run?
He was, in point of fact, pretty much powerless. There was always at least one student on the staff who owned a car. The printer was a job shop. Our sponsor never got his hands on the copy, coming or going. He was cut out of the loop. Not meanly, it just worked out that way.
But one day I recall it got truly absurd. One of the vice principles was in the office berating our sponsor, demanding explanations about why he could not control us. A couple of us finally had had enough and physically stepped between them. “Why are you talking to to him? He has nothing to say about it. If you have questions, you should ask us.”
You would have thought we were speaking an alien language. She looked at us like it was the first time she realized we were there. She had no answer. What we were saying to her did not fit her conception of the world. We were students. We had no rights!
But we had some power and we were making her face that fact. And that is the reality when it comes to this kind of thing. Politics aside, school administrations—any level—assume final say over what the students may do. Even if they don’t come right out and say that, they think it, and it baffles them when the reality confronts them.
A year or two after I graduated, they shut the paper down. Completely. They were waiting, it seems, for that particular generation of staffers to be gone and they closed it down. A few years after that, they relaunched it. But it was vacuous. It was the social rag they always expected the paper to be, with almost zero relevant content.
So I’m looking at all this going on now and seeing nothing really new, at least not attitudinally. School administrations can’t stand it when their students defy them. Only now, the ideology in question is even more relevant to the larger cultural enterprise, so this predictable lack of support has sharper consequences. They’re teaching the wrong lesson. Conformism is a prison when there are no challenges.
Instead of demanding school administrations sit on their unruly students, we should be appreciating the good trouble such enterprises promote, because that placid calm people think is indicative of a functioning community is the induced coma of intolerance. If what you read unsettles, then it’s doing something as opposed to nothing. And if you wish to teach journalistic integrity, you have to let the experience be real, which means backing the endeavor even when occasionally they get it wrong.
But the allure of control is a difficult drug to resist, especially when it comes with the approval of those who do not want to be questioned or made accountable.
I repeat, conformism is a prison when there are no challenges.
The Distal Muse
Academic Conscience
The recent actions taken against university and college newspapers should bother everyone. It won’t, of course, starting with the attitude among too many that these are not “real” newspapers. They’re student papers and even when the students in question are well into their twenties, there’s this notion that they’re kids. They’re still in school, after all, how mature can they be?
We learn best by doing.
I entered high school in 1969. The school had a paper and I wanted to be on it. Took me a good deal of the year, but as a freshman I joined the staff.
1969-70. Vietnam, the counterculture, campus protests, the civil rights movement, and 1970 was the year of Kent State. I walked in among people my age or a year or two older who were involved in the issues of the day. They weren’t running a paper that was exclusively concerned with what went on in the school. There were people on the staff who had strong opinions. Whether the “adults” around us admitted it or not, these were not “kids.”
So immediately I was there for the controversies. And there were many over the four years of my involvement. That first year the paper had published a multi-part series on drugs at our high school. The administration went ballistic. “There are no drugs at this school.” Really? Where were they? When the paper won an award for that story, suddenly the administration was “so proud of our students.” It was a master class in hypocrisy.
We had trouble keeping subscriptions up, so we petitioned for permission to sell ads. When one of the first ones we ran was from Planned Parenthood, the Mrs. Grundy Committee was on us again.
During my time, we were in regular conflict with an administration that disapproved. They wanted no controversy. They did not wish to explain things to the PTA. They got angry phone calls from upset parents. Every time they tried to suppress us, we felt we were doing something right.
What drove me to distraction was their refusal to deal with us. The students. Our hapless sponsor got all the heat. Why couldn’t he control us? Why was he allowing such things to be published? Wasn’t he aware of how bad all this made the school look? They berated him as if he could just keep us after school for punishment. Of course, he was in a bit of a moral quandry, since he was not all that much older than we were and sympathized with the views we thought were important. The administration just wanted us to do stories about Homecoming or who was dating who or the new teachers just hired. You know, social pages stuff. Actual journalism, well, we were kids.
I personally got into hot water over two things I wrote. I did an editorial about the guy drumming up trouble over the harp seal hunts on the St. Lawrence. He showed up to tell us about it. He was fundraising, too. I did some research and ended up asking what he expected the United States to do about it, since the St. Lawrence, in the section where and when the hunts took place, was international waters. Maybe we should do something about the importation of the products made from the fur. It was critical. I questioned his tactics, not his cause. I drew the personal ire of a particular teacher. It was messy and I ended up having to find a way to stay out of her class, since she more or less promised to punish me for having the temerity to criticize someone who had written a book.
The issue triggered a larger discussion. It served a few purposes. It advanced the dialogue, which, if this teacher had had her way, would have died aborning.
The other trouble was more dramatic for me personally. There was a budget issue that led to the suggestion that we had to choose between new uniforms for the varsity football team and band. Band. They were considering cutting band so the boys could have their uniforms. I thought that was absurd and said so and pointed out the academic benefits between the two programs and which was more likely to produce life successes. For my trouble five or six guys from the varsity team crowded into the newspaper office and tried to throw me out the window. We were on the second floor, but it was more like a three story drop. A number of teachers and security guards had to intervene. Lesson learned about the absolutely juvenile reaction of some people when a sacred cow is poked.
I have loathed football ever since.
But the question was thrown again at our sponsor, why did he allow that editorial to run?
He was, in point of fact, pretty much powerless. There was always at least one student on the staff who owned a car. The printer was a job shop. Our sponsor never got his hands on the copy, coming or going. He was cut out of the loop. Not meanly, it just worked out that way.
But one day I recall it got truly absurd. One of the vice principles was in the office berating our sponsor, demanding explanations about why he could not control us. A couple of us finally had had enough and physically stepped between them. “Why are you talking to to him? He has nothing to say about it. If you have questions, you should ask us.”
You would have thought we were speaking an alien language. She looked at us like it was the first time she realized we were there. She had no answer. What we were saying to her did not fit her conception of the world. We were students. We had no rights!
But we had some power and we were making her face that fact. And that is the reality when it comes to this kind of thing. Politics aside, school administrations—any level—assume final say over what the students may do. Even if they don’t come right out and say that, they think it, and it baffles them when the reality confronts them.
A year or two after I graduated, they shut the paper down. Completely. They were waiting, it seems, for that particular generation of staffers to be gone and they closed it down. A few years after that, they relaunched it. But it was vacuous. It was the social rag they always expected the paper to be, with almost zero relevant content.
So I’m looking at all this going on now and seeing nothing really new, at least not attitudinally. School administrations can’t stand it when their students defy them. Only now, the ideology in question is even more relevant to the larger cultural enterprise, so this predictable lack of support has sharper consequences. They’re teaching the wrong lesson. Conformism is a prison when there are no challenges.
Instead of demanding school administrations sit on their unruly students, we should be appreciating the good trouble such enterprises promote, because that placid calm people think is indicative of a functioning community is the induced coma of intolerance. If what you read unsettles, then it’s doing something as opposed to nothing. And if you wish to teach journalistic integrity, you have to let the experience be real, which means backing the endeavor even when occasionally they get it wrong.
But the allure of control is a difficult drug to resist, especially when it comes with the approval of those who do not want to be questioned or made accountable.
I repeat, conformism is a prison when there are no challenges.
Just some thoughts.
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