Four journalism students from across the country described facing censorship, arrest and harassment for covering their schools’ most pressing issues during a Sept. 30 celebration of student reporting at UC Berkeley Journalism.
The event, hosted by the Student Press Law Center and moderated by NBC News White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, highlighted the tenacity of students who have fought to publish powerful stories for their communities.
Each credited the free legal support and advocacy from the Student Press Law Center, while SPLC Executive Director Gary Green applauded the students’ work at a time of increasing harassment of journalists.
“As long as we’re here, no student journalist will ever have to navigate a censorship challenge alone,” Green said.
Stanford University senior Dilan Gohill, currently The Stanford Daily’s news managing editor, spoke of his arrest while covering student protests on campus in 2024.
Although charges and university discipline were eventually dropped after months of advocacy by Gohill’s attorneys and free press groups like SPLC, Gohill said the ordeal showed the real need for student journalism.
“We would not have gotten the full picture if I had not gone in there and had covered that protest,” Gohill said.
Gohill said student journalists serve an important role as neutral, independent observers by documenting everything happening on campus.
Nicholas Mitchell and Aiden McClaren from Gretna East High School in Nebraska shared how they benefited from support from SPLC after administrators censored an editorial cartoon on their student news website.
The cartoon compared ICE tactics to other historical oppressive moments like the Japanese American incarceration camps in the 1940s.
The school district told them to remove the cartoon after it said it received multiple parent complaints.
Mitchell wrote a petition against the censorship and contacted the Student Press Law Center.
“It doesn’t feel right that these people who aren’t in the room doing the work, writing the stories, and getting out the interviews, get to decide on what goes in the paper,” Mitchell said.
UC Berkeley sophomore Myesha Phukan shared how she worked with SPLC to push back against administrative censorship and retaliation as a student at Mountain View High School and how that led her to advocate for greater student press freedom protections.
Phukan said her principal pressured her and others at the student newspaper to soften their reporting on sexual harassment at their school. Soon after their reporting, the principal reassigned their adviser and canceled a journalism class. In response, two student journalists and the former adviser sued the district and the principal, and that lawsuit is ongoing.
Phukan is now an advocacy intern for SPLC, helping other students stand up for their rights by co-leading the same SPLC New Voices Student Leaders Institute that she previously attended as a student.
She credits SPLC for helping overcome the stressful situation of being censored.
“When I was going through censorship, it felt very isolating,” Phukan said. “I didn’t really know what censorship meant or what forms it could take, and SPLC was a super helpful resource in trying to navigate all that.”
In his closing remarks, Brown University student and SPLC student board member James Libresco shared a similar sentiment about his fight against administrative control as a student at Alexandria Public High School in Virginia.
“We were, quite frankly, lost,” he said. “Without finding SPLC, we would not have had the knowledge and confidence to fight back.”
The event capped off a day of SPLC programming at UC Berkeley, including a panel of prominent First Amendment lawyers, a training on covering protests and a discussion on the state of student press freedom in California.
When the students were asked about the future of reporting, there was optimism in the air.
Gohill said the hard skills of investigative work will be extremely useful in the changing times of AI.
McClaren said more people in his community are valuing the coverage by student reporters.
“I see people who are paying more attention to journalism, and maybe I was just young, but I’ve never seen that before,” McClaren said.
Green said that the Student Press Law Center exists to help students like these build the future of journalism and press freedom.
“We know that when we invest in student journalists, we invest in something far greater than student media,” he said. “Caring for student journalists and giving them the freedom and tools to tell the truth is an investment in our nation’s future.”