Last Thursday an employee in Concordia College’s admissions office removed all copies of the school’s student newspaper from the college’s campus center. The day before, The Concordian had published a front-page story about students drinking alcohol before campus events.
Concordia College, a private liberal arts college in Minnesota with roughly 2,500 students, has a strict “dry campus” policy. The school prohibits the consumption of alcohol on campus, even for students who are 21 years old or older.
Staff members from The Concordian say they think the (unidentified) admissions officer removed the papers because the school was giving a high volume of tours to prospective students last week. In an editorial published Friday, The Concordian’s news editor speculated that the admissions officer feared the article on drinking would project a bad image for the school. Though Concordia’s roots are Lutheran, the confiscation was more than a little puritanical.
The Concordian comes out each Wednesday and prints about 1,200 copies a week. It distributes a third of its copies to the campus center. The confiscation of 400 copies of the newspaper is significant for logistical reasons: removing a third of the paper’s circulation from a central location slashes readership for that week. The incident is more significant, however, for symbolic reasons. The relation between newspapers and the communities they cover is always uneasy. Famed journalist Janet Malcolm described the relation between journalist and subject as fundamentally antagonistic. Newspapers serve, but they also observe: and, inevitably, journalists witness and record events and quotes that do not flatter their subjects.
The Concordia College incident illustrates the somewhat fraught relationship between colleges and student media, particularly at a time when colleges are becoming more and more concerned with reputation.
Reputation has always counted for colleges. For example, the value of a Harvard degree is largely reputation-based. The allure of Harvard comes in part from our measure of its academic quality — its classes and professors — as well as its prominent place in American thought and culture. Yet the name itself counts for a lot. And other schools scrambling their way up the higher-education food chain are eager to establish reputations of a similar caliber.
In recent years, colleges and universities have taken more steps to brand and market themselves in the public eye. One way to assess this trend is to examine how much more money and attention university communications staffs receive. The University of Virginia provides a relevant example: the school recently took a major step to beef up its communications apparatus by bringing on a chief communications officer.
An increased concern for reputation carries with it the potential to aggravate tensions between a school’s communications center, which works to cast the school in the best possible light, and independent student media outlets, which aspire to accuracy above all else. At times, this tension erupts into an incident like the one we saw at Concordia. Last week’s paper chase, by the way, was the sixth student newspaper theft reported to the Student Press Law Center in 2013. In 2012, the center recorded 27 thefts.
Few people apart from those involved in college journalism are likely to take note of the Concordia confiscation. It seems to be an isolated and relatively minor incident: the school’s vice president for enrollment promptly apologized to the newspaper staff and affirmed the school’s support of free speech.
Nonetheless, the event provides a snapshot of some challenges that are distinctive to college journalism. Administrators who have authority over students in many other areas of college life are sometimes apt to bristle at an independent student publication. The admissions official who removed the newspapers probably thought that he or she had the right to do so: that as nice as student journalism is as a concept, when it starts to interfere with the grown-ups doing their jobs, it’s got to go.
College newspapers, as you might expect, do the bulk of their reporting on colleges, which are intensely reputation-conscious. Yet an increased concern for reputation makes independent student journalism more crucial: because someone’s got to tell the other side of the story.
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