Spring Break
Guest column: The Liberty not reaching students due to censorship
Will Rogers
Issue date: 6/5/09 Section: Forum
To censor, as a transitive verb, means "to keep from being published or transmitted: ban, black out, hush (up), stifle, [or] suppress." Todd Simmons, OSU's spokesperson, said in an interview with KEZI regarding the University's treatment of The Liberty's distribution, "I have never seen an instance that they haven't been readily available at multiple locations around campus. So if that qualifies as censorship, I'd have to be educated as to what the thinking is there." If we don't count the term (winter '09) that OSU officials ordered the removal every single Liberty bin from the OSU campus and tossed them by a dumpster at 35th and Washington, then the multiple locations that Mr. Simmons is referring to are The Memorial Union and Snell Hall. In other words, the only locations that the university is allowing The Liberty to place its bins are in and around the buildings that are owned and run by the student body (ASOSU). By restricting our publication to a single block, if even that, of campus, OSU officials are stifling and therefore censoring The Liberty.
The main justification for censoring The Liberty is that OSU considers The Liberty to be an off-campus publication. Unfortunately, OSU has no objective standard for what is or is not an off-campus paper, so the classification effectively falls to subjective decision making, which is therefore arbitrary, to determine what the students will or will not have easy access to. Simply put, there are no rules, only subjective, shifting judgments. More disturbing than the lack of codified procedures is that The Liberty already had larger distribution than was previously approved by university officials. One used to be able to find our publication in several places encompassing a much larger area. For us, though, the cherry on top of this logical fallacy is how university officials stated, "even if The Liberty became a student publication, they still would not have the same distribution as The Daily Barometer because of the daily paper's 100 year tradition at the OSU campus." It doesn't take a constitutional scholar to know that a "100 year tradition" defense wouldn't hold water in a court. If the first amendment, freedom of speech, isn't the issue here, then surely the 14th amendment, equal protection under the law, is.
The main justification for censoring The Liberty is that OSU considers The Liberty to be an off-campus publication. Unfortunately, OSU has no objective standard for what is or is not an off-campus paper, so the classification effectively falls to subjective decision making, which is therefore arbitrary, to determine what the students will or will not have easy access to. Simply put, there are no rules, only subjective, shifting judgments. More disturbing than the lack of codified procedures is that The Liberty already had larger distribution than was previously approved by university officials. One used to be able to find our publication in several places encompassing a much larger area. For us, though, the cherry on top of this logical fallacy is how university officials stated, "even if The Liberty became a student publication, they still would not have the same distribution as The Daily Barometer because of the daily paper's 100 year tradition at the OSU campus." It doesn't take a constitutional scholar to know that a "100 year tradition" defense wouldn't hold water in a court. If the first amendment, freedom of speech, isn't the issue here, then surely the 14th amendment, equal protection under the law, is.
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Viewing Comments 1 - 4 of 4
Dave Picray
posted 6/05/09 @ 4:14 AM PST
Tell me about it! I was "excluded" from OSU for merely talking to my former co-workers in an outdoor public area after being fired from GCA. The reason given was "disrupting the work environment," but there is no such rule, and the people I talked to weren't clocked in!
I appealed the exclusion to Jack Rogers, but he denied it "until further notice" and my rights (as an OSU alumnus) to free speech and freedom of association are violated indefinitely for breaking a rule that does not exist!
I filed a petition in the Oregon Supreme Court for a Writ of Mandamus to force Rogers to withdraw the exclusion, but the Barometer's own Ms. (Continued…)
MT
posted 6/08/09 @ 9:09 AM PST
"We are conservative heavy but we're in no way tied to any viewpoint"
Wow. How can you say both things in the same sentence? Are you ashamed to be conservative? Or are you just intentionally self-contradictory?
"It is an all-volunteer staff . (Continued…)
Demaskieren
posted 6/10/09 @ 8:00 AM PST
The Liberty is a trite tabloid/op-ed waste of paper that came around with the far-right was butthurt that part of their student fees were going to help with the creation of the Pride Center. (Continued…)
Demaskieren
posted 6/12/09 @ 10:06 AM PST
On top of that, the Liberty is a Student Organization that publishes a piece of work.
It'd be like any other group on campus from Ultimate Frisbee to College Republicans to Alpha Phi sorority printing something. (Continued…)
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