Abstract

Court Rulings Spur Growth in Campus Censorship

The new school year brings new censorship threats for student journalists heading back to campus. In an August ruling that's likely to affect the entire system of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin, a federal appeals court ruled in Southworth v. Grebe, that officials at the Madison campus could not use any student's mandatory activities fees to fund campus groups whose political activities the student opposes. Related challenges have been made involving public universities in California and Oregon. The Madison ruling can be traced back to a case at the University of Minnesota almost twenty years ago. Just over one-third of the papers in the Associated Collegiate Press network rely on student fees to operate. The Student Press Law Center has identified censorship through funding as one of the top ten obstacles facing college journalists. The Madison ruling also plays into the fastest-growing form of censorship in recent years-newspaper theft. Students across the country have stolen papers to protest a political viewpoint, and recently an administrator used the same tactic.