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Student government cuts off funds to paper at UC-Santa Barbara
Student representatives angry over apartment advertisement
January 19, 2007
Campus administrators have questioned
the legality of the move, and the newspaper, The Daily Nexus, is
considering pursuing legal action if the decision is not reversed, Editor in
Chief Kaitlin Pike said.
“I don’t see it as being legitimate
in any way,” Pike said. “If they continue to do this ... they are
looking at a lawsuit. I have no qualms about taking them to court over
this.”
The Daily Nexus sold full-page ads to Conquest
Student Housing, a property firm that evicted all the families from a 55-unit
apartment complex during the fall, according to Daily Nexus reports. The
student legislative council enacted a boycott against the company and applied it
to all groups under its funding umbrella, called the Associated Students. The
boycott has been a political tool of the student government in the past, such as
when it joined the United Farm Worker’s international boycott of
California grapes in 1993.
When passing the resolution that cut funding,
council members pointed to a clause in the Associated Students Legal Code, which
states that if a group that receives money from the council breaches a boycott,
they can lose their funding.
Although The Daily Nexus receives
almost $50,000 from the legislative council, the publication has not been a
member of the Associated Students since 1978, Pike said.
“They
administer [the money], but they’re pretty much a banker,” she said.
“They have no control over it.”
Jeronimo Saldana, the
representative who authored the legislation, told The Associated Press that he
believed the action was socially responsible.
“If the Nazi party
wanted to advertise for genocide, would you put that in the newspaper?” he
said in the AP article. “I know it’s an extreme example, but where
do you draw the line? Do you really need to profit from the eviction –
from the suffering – of these families?”
Pike pointed out
that the publication has extensively covered the story, and the opinion section
of the paper has come down against Conquest Student Housing.
“We
still understand that there’s a difference between advertising and the
news, and it doesn’t matter what we think of the advertisers; we’re
not here to be the moral police of them,” she said.
A university
spokesman said the school’s general counsel is reviewing the legality of
the move, and Marilyn Dukes, interim executive director of the Associated
Students, said she believes the council is in jeopardy of violating the
paper’s First Amendment rights, according to an article in The Daily
Nexus.
Pike said the ordeal has made the staff revisit a
long-standing consideration of becoming independent of student fees. The money
from student government accounts for roughly 7 percent of its budget, with ad
revenue composing the remaining share.
“The staff also is just
annoyed,” she said. “Because we have better things to do and so does
student government.”
By Brian Hudson, SPLC staff
writer
© 2007 Student Press Law Center
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