News

MASSACHUSETTS -- Libel charges, stolen magazines and sexual harassment claims plagued The Primary Source over the course of the last year.

MASSACHUSETTS ' Former student journalist Avik Roy can breathe a little easier after a state appeals court dismissed a libel suit against him in May.

Roy, a former reporter at Counterpoint, a publication written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wellesley College students, was accused of libel by a Wellesley professor.

Professor Tony Martin sued Roy, claiming Roy libeled him in an 1993 article that said Martin was granted tenure only after he filed a racial discrimination suit against Wellesley.

Controversial content has given rise to heated debate, deception and resignations at college newspapers across the country.

NEW YORK ' Former student editors of the College Voice at the College of Staten Island are preparing to appeal a federal district judge's March 28 decision in a case where student government officers impounded an issue of the newspaper.

Judge Nina Gershon dismissed the charges that members of the paper had brought against members of the student government.

Many hard-working newspaper staffs across the country see their product disappear, literally, every year.

FLORIDA ' Prior approval will no longer be the norm for speech on the Miami-Dade Community College campus.

NORTH CAROLINA ' The press is often referred to as the Fourth Estate, separate from government and a watchdog for the benefit of readers.

Joe Wilbur, executive editor of The Carolinian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, says school officials are obstructing the guardian role the newspaper plays.

Wilbur said if the college has its way, the paper will return to the role it used to play ' that of a public relations tool.

Free-speech zone policies have come under fire at two universities this spring, and national civil rights organizations including The Rutherford Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education are taking notice.

\n The Rutherford Institute filed a complaint against West Virginia University in federal court on behalf of students at the school, claiming their First Amendment rights had been violated.

TEXAS -- A second-year medical student who was expelled from Texas Tech University's medical school for writing a newspaper column has been granted a temporary injunction and will be allowed back into school.

CALIFORNIA ' Editors at The Koala, an underground humor publication at the University of California at San Diego have escaped student disciplinary charges in June for their coverage of a meeting on campus.

The editors faced punishment that some say amounted to censorship.