Typically when you hear about a college newspaper being threatened with censorship, budget cuts or a publication freeze, the university administration is the agent pulling the plug. Not so at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where the student governing board ordered the student-run Montclairion newspaper to stop the presses in the midst of threatened litigation.
The Montclairon had taken issue with the SGA’s closed meetings, accusing the association of violating a state open meetings act—and went to far as to hire an outside attorney to advise on legal proceedings to open the meetings to the public.
Because the newspaper is funded by the student government, the SGA contends that it has a right to set rules and make budget decisions—which is exactly what it did, freezing the Montclarion’s budget Jan. 22 and thus preventing publication of the semester’s first issue. The SGA, after demanding that the paper turn over all correspondence with its lawyer, unfroze part of the budget Jan. 30 and finally withdrew its demand Wednesday.
At the same meeting, however, SGA legislators voted to strip an article from the Montclarion constitution that reads, in part:
“All rights provided for the student press by state, local and federal laws are guaranteed to The Montclarion and take precedence over all SGA statutes… Neither the [SGA] or the current Administration of [MSU] can make any attempts to interfere with The Montclarion’s rights as a news organization.”
SGA leaders said the provision, which was approved in April 2007, went too far in defining the newspaper’s editorial and legal range:
“The Montclarion is completely subject to the will of the university and the SGA,” said SGA Chief Justice-elect Nathaniel Liberty, as he explained the decision to call Article XII unconstitutional. “The Montclarion does not function the same way as a state-funded school’s* newspaper would,” Liberty later said. “The Montclarion is not independent.”
(*Montclair State, as a public university, is in fact a state-funded school)
As the controversy has gone national and attracted the attention of the ACLU, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , the on-campus debate is heating up even more.
[…] Mr. Policinski recently wrote a column about a series of incidents at Montclair State University in which a student newspaper challenged the regulations placed upon it by the student government association, who funds the paper. For more information on the Montclarion debate, please see this post. […]