After three years of reporting for Technician, I’ve seen a pretty wide range of things this University has to offer.
I’ve covered ticket scandals, car accidents and murder trials – but through all that, I’ve never been more surprised than I was as I sat in my office Wednesday afternoon.
It was there the adviser for Student Media informed me that at 4 p.m., the day before the first orientation session was to begin, Provost Larry Nielsen authorized employees in the office of New Student Orientation to pull the fliers Student Media had produced to recruit new students there.
I was speechless.
I failed to understand why University administrators would advocate such a blatant form of censorship over material like this.
It didn’t advocate illegal activity.
It didn’t incite onlookers to riot through the Brickyard.
It wasn’t even something Campus Police considered at the time to be indecent exposure.
The controversy arose over one of the six photos printed on the flier. It depicted one of our female staff members being hugged by the “Shamrock Streakers,” a group of male students who ran through campus in thongs and green body paint on St. Patrick’s Day – an event which ran as the dominant story in this very paper the day after.
After the scant amount of discussions I was able to have with various administrators in the hour before the end of the business day, I was able to figure out that concerns over the photo were primarily related to how Student Media was presenting itself to the new students.
Although this sentiment probably comes with good intentions, concerns over how this organization presents itself is not the job of this administration.
It’s ours.
Like every other medium, every photo, every headline and every caption that appears in this publication requires discussion, editing and review. We think about how every story will make us appear to the public, how every photo will affect our readers.
This flier was no different.
Now I’m not saying by any means that the University administration has no right to pay attention to what goes in those packets for new students, especially if they would like to make a distinction that everything in these packets is clearly endorsed by the University. They can throw out every single flier they think doesn’t adequately represent the University, every thing they think any parent or new student may find offensive.
But if they want to make sure they are only portrayed in a positive light, it’s up to them to make sure the guidelines state, very clearly, that this is what they want.
As it stands, Student Media did everything the page-long guidelines dictated for the submission of fliers into the orientation packets, including submitting the flier to representatives for New Student Orientation by June 23 – almost two weeks ago.
We realized a long time ago that orientation is the most crucial time for recruiting the students we need to supply the campus with five different sources of media. It was even the place I was recruited when I entered as a freshman. That’s why Student Media decided to invest $2,000 on fliers meant to encourage students to get involved and continually improve these publications.
The actions by Nielsen will undoubtedly hurt our recruitment and we will have to work harder to get students interested in working for Student Media.
One way or another, we’re going to get our $2,000 back.
In the meantime, we’ll show students that photo and cover this issue until we find out what the University will do to rectify the situation. You can be sure we’ll bring this issue right out into the open where it should be.
Because there’s one thing about censorship – it’s only effective if it’s kept silent.