College student newspapers under fire but needed

Student-run newspapers at colleges across the country are under fire, which is not news in other years, but is extraordinary at this time in U.S. history because of the political open season on higher education that exists. This should concern you.

Some college and university student government bodies are trying to cut funding for these papers. Kansas University’s student government proposed earlier this year cutting funding 80% and requested more journalism school funding for The University Daily Kansan. That proposal failed but student government later dropped funding by about 60%.

Meanwhile, signs of political pressure on the papers exist while the Trump administration carries out open season on higher education.

Yet, college student newspapers across the country are important for several reasons, with two standing out. One is the basic need to report accurately what is happening to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and anyone else with a stake in a college or university, especially when attention-grabbing events and trends bring outside news organizations to campus.

The other is because of the access these papers have to cover colleges and universities that are coming under fire for things like teaching critical thinking and including voices that otherwise are marginalized or ignored.

This current urgency comes at a time when college and university campuses are skittish about how the Trump administration is going to strike at them for things Trump and his followers do not like. It is working. Threats to withhold funding have places like Columbia University giving in to Trump efforts to identify demonstrators the administration wants to punish, taking stronger oversight of student groups, and hiring 36 special campus police to make arrests when necessary — read that to mean during protests.

Student journalists’ perfect spot from which to cover such stories comes from living college life day-after-day with better access than outsiders to the impact of laws like those in Iowa that remove trans and nonbinary people from civil rights protection, restricting inclusion and equity, and threatening funding for higher education institutions. These students have to face the people they write about each day and be accountable for their stories.

They also have to deal with abuse. Researchers at Northeastern University School of Journalism reported in 2022 that criticism tossed at 218 surveyed student journalists from U.S. colleges across the country over the previous year extended to online harassment in many instances. “This research convinced us that teaching student journalists about on-the-job harassment is a crucial step in reshaping journalism’s overall professional culture into something more inclusive, accessible and supportive of new practitioners,” the researchers wrote for Poynter.

The abuse was so bad, the researchers said, that it could deter women and people of color from being journalists at a time the profession needs to be more diverse.

This means we have to shift collegiate journalism training for the current world. In this world, students covered in campus newspapers during any political activity fear that the coverage puts them at risk for retribution, or, for international students in this country legally, of deportation. Grinnell College, in the middle of Iowa, has students carrying passports from more than 60 countries.

Exhibit A is Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University graduate student from Turkey whose infraction appears to criticizing Tufts administrators in a student newspaper opinion piece in a dispute over divesting Tufts funds from companies with ties to Israel.

Chilling reactions feed off each other. Students stop expressing opinions in their college paper. College papers start questioning whether or not they should identify people who call in public places for changes in public policy, thereby altering the factual depiction of public events. College administrators worried about showing up on the government’s radar pressure student newspapers to censor sensitive information, not only to protect their students but to protect themselves and the college or university.

Imagine wondering 50 years from now why no one opposed Trump administration moves if protest news were eliminated from college newspaper websites in order to protect participants and colleges.

This kind of thinking used to be wild, fearmongering nonsense. Not anymore.

Lyle Muller is a retired Iowa journalist who still works as the professional adviser for Grinnell College’s Scarlet & Black newspaper. He is a former editor of The Gazette (Cedar Rapids), He is a recipient of the Iowa Newspaper Association’s Distinguished Service Award, Iowa College Media’s Association’s Eighmey Award, and Iowa Newspaper Association’s Stratton Award.