Three weeks after the acting president of Hampton University confiscated copies of a student publication following its editors' refusal to run her letter to the editor on the front page, a national association of newspaper executives has decided to discontinue funding a summer journalism program at the school.
The American Society of Newspaper Editors previously had earmarked $55,000 for Hampton University to host its High School Journalism Institute, also scheduled at five other locations across the country, said Director Peter Bhatia, who added that after the incident, the group did not believe it would be appropriate to hold such an event at an institution that did not uphold the principles of free press.
"We're an organization that exists to serve the newspaper industry," he said. "The actions that have been taken at Hampton fly in the face of what the first amendment is all about."
Bhatia said that while he did not dispute the university president's authority to maintain editorial control of the paper, it was inappropriate for her to confiscate the newspapers as a means of enforcement.
Chris Campbell, director of the university's recently established Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications, said he asked the society to wait on making a decision until a task force had a chance to report on the issue.
"I think they felt like they needed to make a statement," he said. "I think it's unfortunate."
The funding would have provided for 17 high school teachers to participate in a conference this summer, Campbell said. In the previous two years that the program had been held at Hampton, seminar topics included freedom of information and the state of today's press.
Last month, the Hampton Script, a bi-weekly newspaper established at the university in 1928, ran an article on the front page reporting that numerous health violations had been corrected at campus dining facilities. Hampton Provost and Acting President, JoAnn Haysbert, who was interviewed and quoted in the article, sent a letter to the editor which outlined steps that were being taken to improve sanitation and requested that it be printed on the front page along with the student's story.
When the newspaper's editors refused to do so, instead choosing to run the letter in a customary location on the third page, Haysbert had two university trucking services workers confiscate all 6,500 copies of the paper before they could be delivered.
Script Campus News Editor Daarel Burnette II, who wrote the article which started the controversy, said that he was surprised at the president's reaction.
"I thought the article was pretty fair," he said.
Following the incident, the Script's editors agreed to reprint the paper with the letter on the front page in exchange for the creation of a task force to examine the relationship between the newspaper and the school.
Because the newspaper receives financial support from Hampton University, a private institution, the school's president has the right to exercise editorial control as publisher.
The task force, comprised of newspaper staffers, the director of the journalism department and four faculty members, has since held three meetings and is expected to release an opinion later this year.
Following the announcement that funding for the summer program would be pulled, Haysbert said in a press release yesterday that she is willing to accept the task force's findings in order to resolve the matter.
"I am willing to trust its oversight and decisions," she said.
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