In defense of the Indiana Daily Student

Journalism and the First Amendment are under siege by powerful interests. We can't let that happen.

I went to Indiana University because of the Indiana Daily Student.

The first time my family took me to Bloomington to check out the school, I stopped in the Journalism School lobby, where I grabbed a summer session newspaper off the rack. I was so impressed, so enamored with the idea that after a high school journalism emphasis, I could really write for a big-time college newspaper, maybe even cover IU basketball and Bob Knight. (This was before IU became a football school).

Once in the newsroom – it seemed spacious at the time – I watched a bunch of kids who looked my age doing real, honest-to-goodness journalism. I was home.

I also saw several attractive young ladies on my campus tour. That didn’t hurt the cause, either.

The Journalism School was great, but I was never a committed student. I did just enough to get by. I had two passions, working at the IDS and playing club ice hockey. I was only good at one of the two. Well, there was a third passion starting around my sophomore year – partying. I joke that I double majored in journalism and self-medication. But I did live by the “work hard, play hard” dictum. I survived. No regrets.

The IDS family was my family. Every weekend, we’d end up in one of our staffer’s apartments, everybody stopping at 11:30 to gather in front of a small TV to watch this great, new show, Saturday Night Live. I remember the late nights in the newspaper’s backshop. I remember the high-level confabs among sports staffers at Nick’s. I remember Bob Knight wanting to bite my head off. I remember some of my wonderful advisors and professors, like Marge Bluett and Ralph Holsinger.

But mostly, I miss the glorious times we had putting out our newspaper together.

And I learned. I learned all the essential lessons of good newspapering. It was all hands on, a real-world experience I knew would guide me to a solid newspaper job in some far-flung city. The idea that the IU administration is wielding an axe to a century-and-a-half old institution by refusing to print their newspaper, leaves me angry, to say the least.

I know I’m sounding like an old fogie, but I grew up wanting to be a newspaperman. There was always something magical to me about the newspapers, and I was blessed to grow up in the New York suburbs, where you could read The Post, The Daily News, Newsday, The New York Times (although their sports section sucked) and the underrated Newark Star-Ledger. (Jerry Izenberg was a master craftsman of the language). I’d like to say I read them all front to back, thus making me a towering intellect, but the truth is, I hungrily consumed the sports sections. I was one of those weird kids who knew what he wanted to do when I was around 14, 15 years old. Once my parents gave me an electric typewriter for Chanukah, I was on my way.

Anyway, I’m rambling.

The point of this screed?

To put it simply, my alma mater’s administration is aggressively censoring the Indiana Daily Student. This is all part of a greater issue, which is the growing hostility to the media and the First Amendment in this country.

If you’ve read this far, there’s a pretty good chance you at least know the vague outlines of the story, so I’ll spare you the details.

It comes down to this: IU, my school, already has the terrible reputation for being one of the most hostile schools in the nation to the First Amendment, much of it stemming from the way the administration handled the anti-Israel demonstrations. This is not the IU I attended from 1978-82. We were never told what to do, what to write, what to cover by the school’s powers-that-be. Once, our faculty advisor strongly suggested I not ask Knight for a comment on a story I was doing. Did I listen? Of course not. And I ended up with Knight in my face, spittle flying, his face beet red. It was understood that the IDS, which I remember was self-supporting back in the glory days of the physical newspaper, was completely free of administration influence.

That’s the ultimate problem for any outlet that does not have full fiscal independence, and the sad truth is, it’s difficult for any media outlet to stay solvent on its own, much less a college newspaper. We saw what happened to NPR and PBS, two organizations that were government-funded and found themselves in the President’s crosshairs.

The IU administration, which I’m deducing is terribly thin-skinned, now claims it is moving the emphasis over newspapering to digital journalism. In the middle of the semester. And only in response to the IDS’ refusal to capitulate to their demands. This is ugly, and it puts IU in a terrible light. It doesn’t matter whether the IDS is politically left or right – it’s a college paper, so I’ll guess it leans left; we certainly did back in my day – or that they still can publish digitally. This is a university using its heavy hand and its financial leverage to silence a newspaper after demanding that a newspaper not print the news. Which, last I checked, was the whole point of a newspaper.

I don’t know the school president or the dean of the journalism school, but I feel like they acted reprehensibly in this fiasco.

We are now a national story.

And not for football.