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Pentecostal university removes two editors who objected to prior review
© 2006 Student Press Law Center
April 11, 2006
MINNESOTA
— Officials at North Central University dismissed two editors at the
student newspaper last week after they refused to let administrators read
content before publication.
The move comes after a decision by
The
Northern Light’s seven-member
editorial board to stop producing the paper rather than publish only “good
things” about the university, said Hope Bahr, the paper’s editor in
chief.
On Thursday officials at the private Pentecostal university
told Bahr along with her husband, Chuck Bahr, who was the paper’s news
editor, that they were being removed from their positions.
University
spokesman Susan Detlefsen said the decision to remove the editors was not
strictly based on content, but based in part on “a conflict of interest in
the hierarchy.”
“It was determined by the administration
to be an issue as to whether or not [Hope] could supervise her husband,”
Detlefsen said.
Detlefsen also denied the Bahrs’ claim that
the university only wanted “good news” in the paper. She did say
that this was not the first time university officials have been in disagreement
with the student newspaper.
“In the past several years there
have been instances where the administration has felt the need to do a closer
examination of the contents of the paper, in those instances the administration
has worked with the editorial staff,” she said.
University
President Gordon Anderson cited two main problems with the student
newspaper’s coverage, according to an
article in Inside
Higher Ed, an online education news source. The first problem arose when Chuck
Bahr wrote an article on the Soulforce Equality Ride, a bike tour protesting the anti-gay policies at 19
Christian and military campuses. Administrators were also upset with the student paper
over an opinion article that questioned the Pentecostal doctrine of
“speaking in tongues.”
Anderson told Inside Higher Ed
that because the university owns the newspaper and both are private entities,
there is no First Amendment question in the case.
Because North
Central is a private university, administrators there do not have the same
constitutional limitations in censoring student media that are found at public
institutions.
Although some students have voiced support for the
Bahrs, Chuck Bahr said many students have sided with
administrators.
“There’s a lot of students who seem to
have the opinion that the school has every right to do what they’re doing.
They say ‘ you guys are being rebellious,’” he said. “I
definitely haven’t seen as much support from the students as I would like
to see.”
Student press advocates said that even without grounds
for a legal complaint, administrative censorship makes for bad
journalists.
“I'm pleased that the students went public with
this change and I hope the negative publicity becomes a teaching moment for the
college's administrators,” said Tom Rolnicki, executive director of the
Associated Collegiate Press, a national organization based in Minneapolis for
college student journalists. “Student journalists at private colleges
should be given the same free expression rights, including no prior review
policy, as their peers at public
colleges.”
Hope
Bahr said she believes that being a Christian means pursuing the
truth.
But administrators at the school would say,
“’Secular journalism is different from faith-based
journalism,’” she said. “I disagree with that as a Christian
journalist.”
—by Ricky
Ribeiro, SPLC staff writer. SPLC staff writer Evan Mayor contributed to this
report.
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