Southern Methodist University administrators stymie student newspaper criticism

Jessica Huseman, summer editor-in-chief at SMU’s Daily Campus, penned an article criticizing the university’s trustees for holding closed meetings and a general lack of transparency. Huseman’s contribution was part of a “Top Issues” list for the June 3 campus orientation issue that is mailed to new students in the summer.

But university administrators deemed Huseman’s transparency critique unfit for publication. The rest of the list of issues, which included items on the lack of student diversity and concerns over campus unity, made it to the final print version.

Huseman has posted her transparency piece on The Daily Campus website and also linked to an explanation of the politicking:

The SMU administration typically has no control over The Daily Campus’ content. There is one exception to that rule: The mail-home summer edition. This issue is mailed home to all incoming freshmen, and in return for their mailing addresses, SMU gets to tell us what we can and cannot write. This began in 2007, when the administration became angry after the (newspaper) included an article about alcohol-related deaths in that year’s mail home edition.

Huseman goes on to explain her opinion of the situation:

The real issue here is this: The student newspaper is not meant to be a PR tool of the school or the board. It is meant to be a newspaper. Just like the Dallas Morning News does not report only good things about the City of Dallas, and just like the Washington Post does not only report good things about Capitol Hill, we do not only report good things about SMU. That is not our function. We would be cheating ourselves and our readers if we did not inform them of problems in order that they might be fixed in an appropriate and proactive way.

The nonprofit Student Press Law Center picked up on the story last week. SMU Dean of Student Life Lisa Webb told the center that Huseman’s brief was axed because it “was not germane to the overall content in the issue.”

To be fair, SMU is a private institution and not subject to the transparency requirements of, say, the city of Dallas. They were within their letter-of-the-law rights to yank the content, however distasteful the message they’re sending to students. Maybe this incident is a good learning tool — the student journalists have certainly gotten experience with the censorship that comes when the press is not 100 percent free.

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Contact Kevin Lee at 713-228-3733 or kevin@texaswatchdog.org.

Photo of ‘SMU’ by flickr user Daquella manera, used via a Creative Commons license.