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Our campus paper had to choose between running a critical op-ed or pulling it to avoid a protest
I'm on the student paper at my school in Ohio. We got a piece from a student questioning the new diversity training rules. The dean's office called our faculty advisor and said printing it could 'create a hostile environment'. We had to pick: run it and risk losing our funding, or kill the story. We ran it anyway last Tuesday. Now the administration is reviewing our budget for next year. Has anyone else faced funding threats over content?
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the_oliver2mo ago
The dean's office has a real point about protecting students from harm. If that op-ed made people feel unsafe or targeted on campus, then pulling it was the right call to keep the peace. Student papers get funding from the school, so it's fair for the school to expect some basic rules to be followed. Sometimes keeping a good learning environment means not publishing every single opinion.
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walker.jana2mo ago
Actually @the_oliver, that's a scary way to run a campus paper. If the school can pull any piece that makes someone feel "unsafe," then they can silence any tough opinion. A good learning environment needs real debate, not just peace and quiet. Student funding shouldn't mean the school gets to be the editor. Once you start hiding views to avoid hurt feelings, you stop teaching kids how to think for themselves.
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milar4616d ago
Walker.jana makes a solid point that I actually read in this article about campus censorship last week. The author talked about how "safety" can become a way to shut down any disagreement, not just hate speech. That op-ed might have been bad, but once a school starts pulling articles for making people feel unsafe, there's no clear line anymore. The dean's office basically became the editor, which defeats the whole purpose of a student paper. If the op-ed was really that bad, the proper move would be to run a rebuttal in the next issue, not erase the original. That's how real debate works, not by hiding from tough conversations.
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