A year ago, the staff of former student newspaper The Mercury were fired en masse for daring to stand up for journalism and free speech at UTD. This week, Indiana University’s administrators have joined the newspaper-killing parade, proving that the assault on student press isn’t an isolated incident but a national trend.
Mere days before the Indiana Daily Student’s 158th print edition was set to publish, university administrators informed the paper’s faculty adviser, Jim Rodenbush, that this newspaper should contain no news — a strange and illegal request. The order came from IU’s Media School: the October edition must contain “nothing but information about homecoming.” Officials stressed this was “an expectation, not a suggestion.”
To his credit, Rodenbush refused. He reminded media school dean David Tolchinsky that “any type of attempt on my end to censor or manipulate any content from a student media outlet is literally against the law.”
Unfortunately, integrity is often a liability for those employed under administrators who are more interested in controlling the narrative than upholding the law. On Oct. 14, Rodenbush was fired and barred from future rehire in the IU system because he had failed to “work in alignment with the University’s direction for the Student Media Plan.”
“Student Media Plan” is a pretty euphemism to refer to censorship, which is unquestionably what is happening when a school’s administration tells a student-run newspaper what it can and cannot print. When the IDS reached out to administrators for clarification, IU responded by announcing that the IDS would no longer be appearing in print, making it an online-only publication one day after firing the adviser and a week after issuing the “no news in print” order.
Within 48 hours, the IDS went from one of the most decorated student newspapers in the country to a war-torn battleground left with no print and no adviser. Just as UTD did when justifying removing The Mercury’s Editor-in-Chief and later firing all its staff, IU will try to justify this any way it can, citing budget constraints or their media plan or saying it’s a move to prepare students for “digital-first careers.”
Whatever way the school tries to spin it, the facts remain and they paint a clear picture. It is not lost on us that this blatant act of censorship follows closely on the heels of the one-year birthday of our very own independent student newspaper, born out of its own battle with administrative censorship.
In our lifespan, The Retrograde has been steadfast in its commitment to a free student press. We just received a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the UT System’s blatantly unconstitutional attempt to institute a bedtime for the First Amendment. We have signed onto an amicus brief in support of The Stanford Daily’s federal lawsuit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s attempts to revoke international students’ visas and deport them for constitutionally protected speech. We have provided advice to other student publications battling censorship across the country, and this past Saturday, we received the Student Press Law Center’s Reveille Seven Courage in Student Media Award.
Because of governmental attacks on free speech, the Stanford Daily has seen a “dramatic decrease” in the number of international students willing to speak on the record, now avoiding interviews or requesting anonymity. International staff members have left the newspaper entirely, with others excusing themselves from coverage related to political events on campus and asking for their old articles to be scrubbed from the web.
They aren’t alone in their fear. We have heard the exact same concerns from international students on our campus. We have received article takedown requests not just for Retrograde articles but for decades-old Mercury articles, and our international staff have requested they be anonymous in their own award-winning work. Across the country, student newsrooms are feeling the noose tightening, which is exactly why The Retrograde has joined with organizations like the Student Press Law Center and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression to stand against this tide of intimidation and suppression.
Our goal is a free student press that’s willing and able to publish the truth. It’s disheartening that this remains an uphill battle. A university campus is supposed to encourage the development of the very skills that make good journalists, and more importantly, good citizens. Ironically, the challenges of censorship often breed more dedicated, knowledgeable and successful student journalists — who also know how to get scrappy and win fights against their own schools. Through their numerous attempts to stifle students’ free expression, institutions like IU and UTD cultivate independent thinking and action within us and our peers, thus ensuring we keep publishing award-winning, provocative, necessary student journalism despite the best efforts of our administrators.
Our commitment to this is unwavering. Nationwide attempts to silence and suppress student voices have yet to slow down, but one of the many benefits of independent nonprofit journalism is that we can continue to lend our voice to this cause without a student media office breathing down our necks about it. The editors at IDS put it best in their editorial regarding the print-issue slash: as long as universities disregard the law, “we’re waiting to come to the table. We will continue to resist.”