To our publisher, the Rev. Kevin Wildes, S.J.:

After we returned from the Associated Collegiate Press national convention in Washington D.C., one thing is clear. What separates the good campus newspapers from the bad is the access they have to the important stories in the community – the ones that give students, faculty and staff a reason to feel proud and the ones that are public relations headaches.

Advisers and editors attending various seminars opened a Pandora’s Box of First Amendment nightmares. One university’s newspaper couldn’t publish the names of students police had arrested, even though their names were a matter of public record. If they tried to do so, the president’s office reserved the right to pull the story – meaning the president had the right to review stories prior to their running and evaluate the propriety of each one, whether or not each story helped advance “the mission central to the university.”

Their president and publisher said the issue was a violation of privacy, when the real impression they wanted to give to their readers was that no student at their university broke the law. “We’re a private university,” they lamented. “And he’s our publisher.” Publisher, in practical terms, means owner. A newspaper’s owner can opt to cover whatever he wants.

They said that administrators “feel that our newspaper should paint a positive picture of the university and not cover things that will make it look bad. They only help us with stories that generate positive P.R.,” they said. Fr. Wildes, we can’t imagine you’ve leapt for joy at either the coverage we’ve given the dorm room fight between two freshman students, or the play we’ve given to the three students facing charges of attempted armed robbery – the two stories that have defined this editorial board’s tenure. Contrary to what many doubters of the press may feel, covering these stories wasn’t an exhilarating rush. We don’t pray for news like that – the lives and futures put in jeopardy by the events involved in each of those stories are kindred to ours. But reporting the facts to our readers about stories like those are central to our newspaper’s identity. Our latest nomination for the Pacemaker, the country’s highest award for college journalism, is made possible because of the content you let us freely generate.

We can’t imagine you’ve enjoyed our calling you out for the censure the American Association of University Professors placed the university under because of faculty firings linked to the controversial “Pathways” plan, or that the newspaper is a forum by which readers voice their grievances over the plan, sometimes directly at you.

We’d imagine you’d rather us run stories about parents’ weekend on the front page, with a story about the visiting chef from Peru packaged somewhere nearby. You have the right to force us to do that, because in fact, you are our publisher, and we do attend a private university. You could force us to pull stories and review what’s ahead in the next issue before we print it, but you choose to catch up on The Maroon’s latest findings like every other reader on campus: by picking up an issue from one of the racks on Fridays.

We’d just like to thank you for that.

Signed,

The Maroon