Tag: Spring 1998

The student newspaper at George Mason University, the Fairfax public school named after the author of the First Amendment, has found itself under the critical eye of the school's board of visitors in the last few months.

The federal law known as the Buckley Amendment does not permit a school board to go into a closed session to discuss the educational records of a former student, Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant wrote.

Students at universities around the nation are using their First Amendment free press rights to cover controversial topics, but in some cases it has cost their advisers their jobs.

A Midwestern State University football player's threats led to the student newspaper editor's resignation and transfer to another school and the student senate to pass a resolution in support of the campus' student media.

FLORIDA -- In an unprecedented use of state hate crimes laws, nine high school students were jailed overnight, suspended and eventually expelled for publishing a pamphlet including comments that the school1s principal perceived as personal threats.

\nThe February 23 arrests of five girls and four boys were in response to the distribution of the underground booklet "The First Amendment," which featured a picture of Killian High School's black principal, Timothy Dawson, with a dart piercing his head and a handwritten article in which the writer wondered, "what would happen if I shot Dawson in the head ...."

\nThe pamphlet also contained a depiction of Dawson engaged in group sex and a caricature of campus security guards womanizing students.

The College Media Advisers organization unveiled a new program in March that will help advisers who have been punished by their schools for doing their jobs.

Two basketball players that were charged with assaulting a Kansas State University student newspaper sports columnist have been punished for their actions.

When students focused an episode of their live television program on the topic of same-sex marriages, they had no idea that it would snowball into a county-wide struggle for journalistic freedom.

A former Rutgers University journalism professor thought that he had a case against the university when it fired him after he wrote several columns for a campus newspaper. An arbitrator said he was wrong.

One portion of the on-going conflict involving Iowa State University, the Iowa State Daily student newspaper and community newspaper publisher Partnership Press, is on its way to settlement.