Students journalists stand up for freedom of the press; plus, censorship at Indiana University

Fifty-five student news organizations have signed on to an amicus brief challenging the Trump regime’s use of federal immigration law to revoke the visas of international students and deport them for speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

The brief was filed by a coalition led by the Student Law Press Center and joined by the Associated Collegiate Press and the College Media Association. Among the student news outlets lending their support to the brief are nine from New England, including our independent student newspaper at Northeastern, The Huntington News. The others:

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  • The Dartmouth, at Dartmouth College
  • The Harvard Crimson
  • The Heights, at Boston College
  • The Mass Media, at UMass Boston
  • The Mount Holyoke News
  • The Trinity Tripod, at Trinity College
  • The Tufts Daily
  • The Yale Daily News

In addition, 11 student newsroom leaders, including one from Bates College in Maine, have signed as individuals.

The amicus brief was filed in support of a lawsuit brought by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is suing Secretary of State Marco Rubio and “challenging two federal immigration law provisions that give him unchecked power to revoke legal immigrants’ visas and deport them for protected speech.” The amicus brief itself says:

Because the First Amendment and a commitment to promoting its lessons and values prohibit the demonstrated chilling effect that has swept across student newsrooms and stands to continue to do so otherwise, the Court should enjoin Defendants from deploying the Revocation Provision and Deportation Provision to attack students for engaging in protected speech….

At stake is nothing less than the ability of student journalists — citizen and noncitizen alike — to engage freely in the democratic enterprise that education is meant to foster. The Constitution demands no less.

Emily Spatz, the editor-in-chief of The Huntington News, writes in a “Letter from the Editor” that her journalists have struggled to find a balance between protecting students and reporting the news since Donald Trump returned to office in January:

Since the start of the second Trump administration, many international students have refused to talk to The News on the record, significantly limiting our ability to document how federal policies are affecting our campus. More alarmingly, four students have asked The News to remove opinion pieces critical of the Trump administration since early March — requests we have granted due to the legitimate fears about their status in the country. These concerns are not unfounded, as exemplified by the detention of Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts University.

Öztürk, as you recall, was the Tufts Ph.D. student who was grabbed off the street by masked ICE goons last March and illegally detained as retribution for an op-ed she helped write for The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel. She is currently free after spending nearly two months in a Louisiana detention facility, but she remains in legal jeopardy.

I think it’s worth pointing out that these student journalists are standing up for the First Amendment at a moment when another story about freedom of the press for college publications is in the news as well. Katie Robertson of The New York Times has a comprehensive summary of the firing of the paid adviser to The Indiana Daily Student, at Indiana University, after he refused to stop students from complying with an edict to remove all news from their special print editions and to instead publish actual journalism only on their digital platforms.

It’s a very strange story, made all the more strange because it appears the administration wants to make it look like they’re doing this strictly for economic reasons rather than to throttle the Daily Student’s ability to distribute news. Eric Rasmusen, a professor of business economics and public policy at Indiana University, has published a useful overview of the situation at his newsletter, writing:

The IDS [as the paper is known] has been in financial trouble for some years, and the University supplies a lot of its budget. He who pays the piper calls the tune, unless the rules are set out carefully. I have heard that there were a number of meetings between Media Dean David Tolchinsky and IDS people on the subject of having a newsless issue of the newspaper. Rumor has it that the Dean offered the compromise of having an issue with news for “the community” and an issue without news for the campus. That’s interesting because it shows the problem isn’t the extra cost of printing news pages, but the idea of letting Homecoming visitors see news at all.

I’ll also note that Ethan Sandweiss of public radio station WFYI reported in June that Republican Gov. Mike Braun had removed all three of the university’s trustees who were elected by alumni and replaced two “with polarizing and well-known conservatives.”

All of which is to say that student publications dependent on university funds are at great risk in the current authoritian environment — and especially for student publications at public universities like Indiana University.

To return to the amicus brief for a moment, every one of the 55 student news outlets that signed on are independent, including The Huntington News. As A.J. Liebling once said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Yes, even student publications that receive some of their money from the university (student fees in most cases) have First Amendment rights, but those don’t count for much when the damage has already been done.

I hope that the students at the IDS are making plans to go independent. In 2025, they don’t need an office, and they don’t need a print edition if they can’t sell enough ads to justify one. Most important, they’ll have their independence.

Maybe they’ll even feel free to sign an amicus brief standing up for their First Amendment rights.