Ron Feemster taught journalism and advised the student newspaper for two years at Northwest College, a residential community collge in Wyoming. It was an education, he writes in The Making of a Real Student Newspaper in Inside Higher Ed.
Feemster want students to write stories that mattered to readers. The college wanted a PR sheet.
The cardinal sin of the Northwest Trail as a student paper was not the fact that it broke big stories. It was the paper’s failure to be “positive” and to “support the college.” I heard this criticism from faculty members, vice presidents, administrative staff and the men’s basketball coach. The coach, Andy Ward, complained in writing to my division chair that the paper wasn’t “on the same team” as his players. At Northwest, a critical story was a disloyal story.
Feemster compared journalism to one of the college’s most respected programs, equine studies.
Students learn horsemanship on the backs of real horses, dangerous animals that hurt people when they are not handled safely. No one would expect an equine student to saddle up a rocking horse. Journalism students can’t learn their craft on a toy paper, either. Although most of the college administrators smiled at my analogy, they seldom treated the student newspaper with the same respect they show a horse.
Midway through his second year, Feemster was told he wouldn’t be rehired. That made him immune to pressure from the administration. The Northwest Trail had a great semester. The administration kept making news by making “very poor decisions.” The students covered the news.
Firing the adviser is not the best way to produce a strong student newspaper. The difficult and mature choice is to learn to live with a free student press the same way the government must live with the professional press. In other words, the administration and student press should learn to live in healthy conflict.
Student journalists will make mistakes, of course. It’s the only way to learn.
When I was a freshman working on the Stanford Daily, we published an op-ed by a student jailed for an offense committed during a protest. He wrote that another student had testified against him and that prisoners believe snitches should be beaten to the consistency of chocolate pudding. The witness complained. The university was very unhappy. They responded by making the newspaper independent. Our mistakes — and the resulting liability — were on our own heads.
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[...] Community College Spotlight: A college newspaper that makes the administration happy isn’t much of a newspaper, writes Ron Feemster, who was fired as journalism instructor and newspaper advisor at a Wyoming [...]