Freedom takes a beating

It's unfortunate when the free press takes a few hard blows. It is even more so when the strikes come from academia, a place where openness and learning is the ostensible day-to-day theme.

That wasn't the case for Hampton University students, all of whom didn't get to see the latest issue of the Hampton Script, the student-run newspaper.

School administrators confiscated the issues prior to homecoming events, students told the Virginia-based Daily Press, because a letter from the university's provost and acting president wasn't published on the front page. The letter, which was slated for page three, pointed to improvements and directed criticism at the media for focusing too much on Hampton's dining facilities and not enough on other schools with failing evaluations.

If this doesn't smack of censorship and an undercut of the First Amendment, what else does?

Any journalist should exercise good judgement and restraint in certain cases. But it is not the job of Hampton University administrators, many of whom may have been embarrassed by the real issue at state: Hampton's cafeteria had consistently failed health code inspections. The desire to publish a front-page letter by university officials was undoubtedly a public relations move.

Don't they have a university newsletter which could yield the same results?

The university claims they are the publisher of the school newspaper, and that the provost exercised judgment as a publisher when pulling the 6,500 copies of the newspaper off the racks.

The acting president's actions will undoubtedly have more implications than angry students and faculty. The school's new journalism school, built with donations from the journalism-inclined Scripps Howard Foundation, may not attract high-caliber faculty, especially when professors' curriculum is at odds with a school that cuts newspaper circulation over differences in opinion.

The paper's editor, Talia Buford, told the Daily Press that she wouldn't have printed the letter if it were The Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.

At least she maintained her integrity in this battle. She inarguably did the correct thing as a journalist.

The Santa Clara, too, has had similar problems with university administrators with story choices, most recently in 1998. But with an arguable protection of the Leonard Law, signed into law by former Gov. Pete Wilson, we hope administrators see the Hampton case as a blow not only to student journalism, but to freedom itself.

"The school needs to decide here: Do they want a student newspaper or a public relations newsletter?" Student Press Law Center attorney Mike Hiestand told the Daily Press. That is precisely the crux of such an egregious censorship move by Hampton administrators.

In the future, universities should leave journalism to the student newspaper, and leave marketing to the public relations department. Freedom of the press deserves nothing less.