During the decade that I have served as the faculty adviser to a college newspaper, I have had my share of headaches, including a $5-million lawsuit for libel. But I didn’t run into real trouble until last semester, when one of the editors of The Voice, the student newspaper at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, wrote a scathing column attacking my department.
The student wrote that the department of mass communications was characterized by political infighting, chaotic class schedules, poor planning, knee-jerk decisions, and unprofessional behavior in the classroom. Although notably short on details, the column included dramatic images. The problems, the student wrote, were “like cockroaches -- where you find one, you will find a thousand.” The column focused on the department chairman, but it did not spare the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.
The president of the university was not mentioned, and the dean turned out to have a sense of humor, so the administration essentially shrugged off the student’s column. That runs counter to the popular myth of the bullying administrator butting heads with student editors; in reality, most administrators, including those at Bloomsburg, are cordial and supportive in their dealings with their campus newspapers.
However, at a meeting of my department after the column appeared, a majority of the faculty members voted to suspend the department’s involvement with the newspaper -- an action that included removing me as the paper’s adviser -- pending a departmental review of “quality and liability issues.”
My case at Bloomsburg is certainly no cause celebre. If I never advise The Voice again, I will miss it. But fortunately, I have tenure and can’t be fired because of something a student decided to write. Other advisers are not as fortunate.
Only about a third of student-newspaper advisers at four-year public institutions are in tenure-track positions. Of those, fewer than half actually have tenure, according to the most recent national figures, from a 1995 survey by the College Media Advisers.
When advisers come under attack, they do what I call the adviser’s dance. This is a tricky three-step in which advisers defend the rights of students to publish what they wish, describe their own nebulous role in the editorial process, and try to explain what happened to cause offense without endorsing stupidity, racism, obscenity, defamation, or whatever other culpable behavior seems to have been involved. If the dance is a failure, the adviser may be out of a job. Often, because most institutions balk at direct assaults on First Amendment freedoms, advisers are not openly fired; instead, their contracts are not renewed, they do not win tenure, or they are told that their department is being restructured.
Advisers who run into trouble usually hear, as I did, about issues of quality and liability. When critics dislike something that a college newspaper has published, they are increasingly likely to complain about the student journalists’ grammar, spelling, accuracy, bias, or ethics. It is true that most members of student newspapers’ editorial staffs have little experience and stay in their positions for only a short time. Even so, the quality of the papers is actually surprisingly good.
Complaints about quality touch the heart of an adviser’s educational mission. The code of ethical behavior set forth by the College Media Advisers addresses the issue directly: “There should never be an instance where an adviser maximizes quality by minimizing learning.” The adviser’s role is not to improve quality by correcting mistakes, but to help editors learn to correct them.
Furthermore, an adviser needs to teach students how to identify and fix problems rather than interfering with the content of the newspaper. The courts have not ignored the threat that complaints about a newspaper’s quality pose to the First Amendment and have consistently supported a hands-off approach.
A landmark case in 1975, Schiff v. Williams, staked out the judicial position. The president of Florida Atlantic University had fired three editors of the student newspaper, describing it as a “smear sheet” that published “incorrect and misleading” stories. The president argued that the paper had embarrassed the university because of poor grammar, bad spelling, and misuse of language. Ruling against the university, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said that even if all the president’s claims were true, they did not justify censorship.
The issue of legal liability is another red herring: Surprisingly few student newspapers are sued. (The $5-million lawsuit I mentioned was dropped.) Until a few years ago, administrators tried to gain greater control over newspapers to avoid libel suits, or so they said. In fact, their real motive was often to try to prevent a newspaper from publishing material they found objectionable.
Today, however, administrators and student journalists alike know that a growing number of court rulings have excused colleges from liability if they have no editorial control. In McEvaddy v. City University of New York in 1995, the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York stated: “The presence of a faculty adviser to the paper, whose advice was non-binding, and the financing of the paper through the student activity fees dispensed by the university, do not demonstrate such editorial control or influence on the paper” as to justify the institution’s liability.
A good adviser is the key to addressing both complaints about quality and concerns of legal liability. Talented, dedicated advisers can protect the rights of students and at the same time protect everyone involved -- including the institution, faculty members, and students -- from unfair reporting, sloppy journalism, and bad writing. The ideal adviser has a Ph.D. in a relevant field and at least several years of experience as a professional journalist. He or she is able to wear many hats: diplomat, computer technician, business manager, advertising manager, editorial adviser, and legal counsel.
For their part, colleges and universities must make every effort to find the best possible advisers for their newspapers. That may mean offering higher pay and a tenure-track position. Unfortunately, a recent review of job announcements for advisers was not encouraging.
One institution in northern Texas, for example, sought a faculty member with a Ph.D. to advise a daily paper as well as to teach reporting and writing, publish research, and “perform service assignments.” Not only does the job sound formidable, but the institution is evidently emphasizing something other than advising. A state university in California took another approach, advertising for a staff member to serve as an adviser. Although the advertisement described no other duties, the staff member would advise seven publications as well as the institution’s radio and television stations. Nobody could do all that work well.
Besides having realistic expectations and offering a good salary, possibly with tenure, institutions should adopt fair methods of reviewing their advisers’ performance. Too often, advisers are evaluated as if their workloads and academic roles were the same as those of other faculty members. For example, it is not uncommon for advisers to carry a full teaching schedule and advise a newspaper for a stipend, or as part of their service to the institution. When advisers receive release time, it is generally for one course, which is rarely sufficient. Furthermore, the student-evaluation forms used to gauge faculty performance are almost always inappropriate for advisers.
In addition, institutions should support their newspaper advisers by providing all the resources needed to publish the paper. Those resources include updated computer networks and support on the business and advertising side with paid staff members, graduate assistants, or work-study students to handle billing, advertisement sales, paste-up, and general office work. Too many student newspapers operate on a shoestring. Their staff members burn out and leave, increasing turnover -- which leads to more work for the adviser and, inevitably, more mistakes in print.
The institution should also do what it can to make the position of student editor-in-chief competitive. Some colleges offer the editor a tuition waiver, stipend, or scholarship. That helps advisers attract the best students for key positions.
Why should an institution go to so much trouble to find and support a good adviser? Because, as any adviser worth the title knows, a free and unfettered press is essential to campus life.
William J. Green is an associate professor of mass communications at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
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Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B8