Originally published October 15 2005
Court rules in favor of censoring high education newspapers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In the recent case of Hosty v. Carter, the Appeals Court ruled in favor of the administration, which shut down school newspapers after a slew of articles were critical of their actions. As a result of the ruling, many free speech advocates are stepping up to take action.
It is highly unlikely that most Americans see censorship of the press as protected under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Still, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals clearly had the limitation of students' right to speak up in mind in a recent ruling promoting the power of college and university administrators to censor dissident students and their news publications.
In this case, the administrators at Governors State University (just outside of Chicago) successfully shut down a campus newspaper called the Innovator, after the paper was critical of the university for wrongfully firing the paper's faculty advisor.
After the Innovator's criticisms, university Dean Patricia Cater demanded that the paper's printer provide her with a copy of upcoming issues prior to mass run-off, in an effort to skirt future criticisms and grant prior approval.
Dean Carter's contempt for dissent landed the university in court, after the Innovator's journalists and editors filed a lawsuit in early 2001.
The authoritarian undertones of the court's ruling are hard to ignore, considering that a majority of the judges in the ruling claimed that a previous decision by the Supreme Court (the Hazelwood decision) limiting the rights of high school students to free speech was now applicable to college and university newspapers.
Hence, this decision put papers not considered as a "designated public forum" in danger of arbitrary censorship by university bureaucracies.
It is certainly a sad day for freedom of expression when college administrators can unilaterally eliminate critical campus newspapers for no reason other than they do not like what views are being expressed.
At Illinois State University, the indy, a weekly alternative newspaper, is one of the many papers across the country dedicated to freedom of thought and diversity of opinion.
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