After months of controversy between the Western Oregon University administration and the university’s student newspaper, an independent committee of academics and a professional journalist has determined that the university did not violate the students’ freedom of the press.
The panel released its report late last month detailing its findings along with recommendations on how to avoid future conflicts like this one.
According to the committee’s report, Western Oregon University President John Minahan told the panel that its recommendation has been accepted and will be implemented.
The panel was formed just days after the Western Oregon Journal’s editor-in-chief, Gerry Blakney, sent a widely distributed e-mail on January 12 to professionals and colleagues claiming that the university administration had repeatedly violated and showed indifference to the Journal’s First Amendment right to free press and asked for outside help to bring the issue to light.
On Jan. 15, Minahan sent out a campus wide e-mail saying:
“The Editor of our student newspaper has made allegations relating to free speech issues that go to the heart of what we stand for as a university. I think these allegations need to be addressed. So, I am naming a panel to investigate the allegations and report back to the campus community no later than the end of this term as to what they have found.”
Both the Western Oregon president and the committee members said they had complete freedom to investigate.
“I went into the investigation expecting that there was something to these allegations,” said Dick Hughes, a WOU Ad-hoc Committee on Free Press member and editorial editor for the Statesman Journal in Salem. “It was stunning to all of us on the committee that the allegations were completely unfounded.”
The report from the ad-hoc committee released April 28 found that while both the university administration and the student newspaper mishandled the situation, “the allegations of free speech and press violations are unfounded.”
The committee investigated four allegations that Blakney made against the administration in his e-mail: that the university violated federal and state law by searching the Journal’s newsroom without the knowledge or consent of the staff, that the administration insisted the newspaper’s masthead not read, “Student Owned and Operated, Reporting the Unabashed Truth,” that “Western’s Admission Office stole and recycled Journal copies with the Associate Provost’s direct knowledge,” and that unauthorized changes were made to the university’s student media board.
The situation started last summer, when Blakney claims that his copy editor, Blair Loving, inadvertently stumbled across a file with personal information which he said included social security numbers, state test scores, grade point averages and contact information for more than 80 university students posted insecurely to the university’s Web site. Loving made a copy of the file and then consulted with Blakney on how to handle the situation, said Blakney. They quickly contacted the university with the information so it could be secured.
Blakney said that he was shocked when the university then searched the Journal’s office for the file at night.
The panel found that “this situation was badly handled by all concerned, but that is not the same as illegal conduct by the university.”
“The university really screwed up big time on a lot of things, but this is not a First Amendment issue, just bad management,” said Hughes.
Hughes said that because the Journal is not an independent newspaper, but is in fact owned by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the actions taken by Loving and Blakney were against university policy.
The committee admitted that the university should not have searched the paper at night without the knowledge of the staff.
The committee found that “the searches appear to be legal but poorly handled … Clear policies need to be established delineating the rights of such organizations.”
Hughes said the entire situation is still a little unclear for several reasons. Firstly, once recognizing that they were dealing with a legal situation, the Journal staff should have immediately sought legal advice, which it never did. Secondly, the copy editor, Loving, was not actually employed by the newspaper at the time the files were discovered.
The committee found that the second allegation, saying the university insisted the Journal change the masthead, was groundless because the student newspaper is in fact owned by the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, not the students, as is said in the current masthead.
Blakney’s allegation that the university stole and recycled copies of the Journal was found inaccurate. Gary Dukes, vice president of Student Affairs, did admit in the committee report that he had attempted to hide copies of the newspaper, which had adult material on the front, on the university’s Fall Preview Day, when many young children would be on campus. Dukes admitted that he handled the situation poorly and issued an apology.
Hughes said that the final allegation was actually a huge misunderstanding between the university and the student newspaper, in which both sides are partly to blame.
Western Oregon University has a media board that forms every year and reviews the Journal, but the board was not formed in spring 2007, as it should have been.
In his e-mail asking for help, Blakney said he had discovered that Dukes had been illegally meeting with Minahan, to make changes to the bylaws.
The board found that Dukes had been researching “proposals” to change the bylaws, but had made no changes. However, Blakney’s concerns were warranted, said Hughes, because they the situation was not properly explained to them.
The committee recommended that the university should “form the Media Board as the rules dictate, and let it do its job … in addition, the affected students should be treated with respect, given clear and correct information, and not misinformed and manipulated. They deserve answers about issues of importance to them, not hedging and stonewalling, which is what they appear to have received from their own Vice President for Student Affairs.”
Hughes summed up the situation as like a “dysfunctional family,” adding that both sides “need to get their act together.”
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