Fit to Print
Fit to Print
Freedom of expression is for all of us, not just the fortunate few who actually own a printing press or a lucrative broadcasting license. It must be protected in places big and small. Late last month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger did his part by signing a new law that makes it illegal for college newspapers in the state to be censored – or for student journalists to be punished for simply exercising free speech.
The law, authored by Assemblymember Leland Yee, is the first of its kind and puts California at the forefront of free-speech rights. “Students working on college newspapers deserve the same rights afforded to every other … journalist,” declared the governor.
For many working journalists and broadcasters, much of what they know about their professions began in a humble campus newsroom. The stories that emerge there can range from the monumental to the trivial, from the genuinely enlightening to the barely legible. A quick survey of nearby college papers shows yet another generation possibly learning to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.
In USC's Daily Trojan, it was revealed this week that male students are still cruising for anonymous sex in campus bathrooms. Students call it “fulfilling,” “discreet,” and “an adventure.” And according to the campus police chief, no one is complaining.
At UCLA, the political divisions roiling the nation since 9/11 can also be seen in the microcosm on the Westwood campus, reports the Daily Bruin, where one professor laments that students and faculty seem “to be more polarized than ever before.”
At Cal State Northridge, two young women were charged with hacking into a professor's computer to alter grades for about 300 students, according to a story last week in the Daily Sundial. They also apparently used the prof's info to order pizza.
At UC Irvine, student demonstrators crowded into tents on campus for two days to illustrate the conditions of refugees fleeing the horrific genocide still ongoing in Darfur, Sudan, reports the New University.
And L.A. Mission College finds itself in some turmoil after the April on-campus beating and arrest of an unarmed 67-year-old instructor by Sheriffs deputies, according to the Valley Star, the weekly student paper at L.A. Valley College.
This is news, and there is more of it every semester and every quarter. And all of it deserves protection from the occasional administrator, either oversensitive or overexposed, who wants to shut these young voices down.
Published: 09/14/2006
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