MEDIA CONTACT: media@splc.org
UPDATE: Ushma S. Neill, chief of staff to Columbia University Acting President Claire Shipman, provided the following response to our letter on June 11:
Thank you for sharing the coalition response letter on behalf of the SPLC and other undersigned groups. Please be assured that it has been received by the Office of the President at Columbia University, and we are taking its contents into account.
As your letter underscores, Columbia has a longstanding commitment to cultivating and supporting student journalism on campus. We appreciate the meaningful contributions our student journalists make to our community by promoting transparency, open dialogue, and documenting campus events.
We cannot share specific information on individual students, including those affiliated with student media organizations, due to privacy considerations related to FERPA. But please be assured that in any situation related to the enforcement of University Rules, measures are only imposed where explicitly warranted by the specific facts of each case. These measures are also subject to strict and regular review.
As an institution, we remain fully committed to the security of the Columbia community and ensuring a campus where student journalists are as supported as possible. Thank you again for your outreach.
ORIGINAL POST:
The Student Press Law Center and 18 other journalism and free speech organizations wrote to Columbia University and Barnard College today to express concern over the institutions’ “appalling treatment” of student journalists.
Four WKCR and Columbia Daily Spectator student journalists were briefly suspended earlier this month after covering a protest on campus. They were banned from participating in classes or finals, and some were told to leave their student housing within 48 hours. Even when those suspensions were lifted, Barnard said its investigations into the students would continue, the Spectator reported.
The Columbia Journalism Review noted these actions are part of a year-long pattern, with Columbia and Barnard “investigating” multiple student journalists for covering pro-Palestinian protests on campus since at least last May.
The coalition’s letter strongly calls on Columbia to cease its investigations into student journalists, expunge the students’ records and take steps to ensure students’ free press rights are respected moving forward. The letter also endorses the requests by Spectator editors that administrators acknowledge the harm done, apologize and engage with student media.
“Columbia’s suspension of student journalists covering breaking news on campus is unconscionable from an institution that represents the pinnacle of journalism education. To do so hours before final exams only magnifies the assault on students and further erodes trust,” said Gary Green, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. “Columbia student journalists have demonstrated repeatedly over the past year that their reporting has been indispensable for understanding the recurring conflicts on their campus. Columbia’s and Barnard’s responses represent a rapidly spreading disease infecting the free press of student and professional journalists alike. Their actions affect not just the student body and student journalists, but everyone who values a free press in society and accountability from our institutions’ leaders.”
In a thorough piece in which the Spectator editors declare that Columbia and Barnard are failing their student press, they also chronicled “physical force and press suppression” against student journalists by the university’s safety officers and the New York Police Department at the May 7 protest.
Today’s coalition letter says that the colleges “have treated members of the student press not as essential chroniclers of campus life and seekers of truth, but as adversaries.” These actions, it says, have tested Columbia’s reputation as a leader in journalism education, and “damage done to your student journalism ecosystem is damage to us all.”
It concludes: “As organizations dedicated to the vital work of journalism, we collectively ask you: Please, do better.”
The coalition includes: Student Press Law Center, Associated Collegiate Press, Association of Foreign Press Correspondents, Association of Health Care Journalists, College Media Association, Courage Foundation, The Deadline Club, Defending Rights & Dissent, Foreign Press Association, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Free Press, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Journalism Education Association, National Press Photographers Association, National Scholastic Press Association, PEN America, Quill and Scroll, Radio Television Digital News Association, Society of Environmental Journalists and Society of Professional Journalists
The Student Press Law Center promotes, supports and defends the free press rights of student journalists and their advisers. As the nation’s only legal nonprofit focused on the rights of student journalists, SPLC provides information, training and legal assistance at no charge to high school and college student journalists and the educators who work with them.