After a full day’s worth of working in the home office, we went out for a brief bike ride. I’m still taking it easy, so I did not push hard on the pedals, except when going uphill. And I stayed out of the drops, until the very end of the ride, when I decided to see what that’d feel like. I quickly decided to not do that. My back and I are in careful and close consultation throughout this recovery period.
We saw the sheep, though.
Then, just a few miles from home, we lost the sun.
A few farms later, we found it once again.
It was a 14-mile ride. And another easy one. It was just nice to be outside. Perfect gilet weather, too.
Last night a colleague in Texas shared with me a photo from a mutual colleague in Indiana, which I am assured is a real place, though I’ve never heard of it. The photo was a letter, an incredibly abrasive pink slip. The recipient of that letter had shared it himself, and this was part of a series of events that will be a national story by tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.
What happened, the student media adviser at Indiana University was fired. The incendiary letter framed the dismissal as a “lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the University’s direction for the Student Media Plan is unacceptable,” but this is a move toward censorship. My colleague was fired for doing his job: standing in defense against censorship.
Here’s the first story written in the professional Indy Star, fittingly written by First Amendment reporter Cate Charron, a former editor-in-chief of the IDS. And, most importantly, here are the current editors of the highly regarded, and directly impacted, Indiana Daily Student.
Media School Dean David Tolchinsky terminated Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush on Tuesday afternoon after he refused to censor the Indiana Daily Student.
Ahead of our Oct. 16 newspaper, which was to include a Homecoming guide inside, the Media School directed us to print no news in the paper, an order blatantly in defiance of our editorial independence and the Student Media Charter.
“… nothing but information about homecoming — no other news at all, and particularly no traditional front page news coverage,” read Rodenbush’s Oct. 7 email to the IDS co-editors-in-chief, relaying the IU Media School’s directive.
Telling us what we can and cannot print is unlawful censorship, established by legal precedent surrounding speech law on public college campuses.
Administrators ignored Rodenbush, who said he would not tell us what to print or not print in our paper. In a meeting Sept. 25 with administrators, he said doing so would be censorship.
“How do we frame that, you know, in a way that’s not seen as censorship?” Ron McFall, assistant dean of strategy and administration at the Media School, asked in that meeting.
Read the whole thing; it’s quite the stinging letter aimed at the Media School and the university as a whole.
We’ve been gone from there for two-plus years, so I know the prologue, but not the details of what’s transpired recently. I know what I’ve read, how the faculty have no trust in the university president, how everyone on campus still has an acid taste in their mouths after being under a sniper rifle last year, how the university is desperately trying to make the president’s plagiarism problem go away, and how the university is intent on reshaping itself in modern social contexts. (Indiana is a long, long, long way from Herman B. Wells.) I know those things from following the work of the IU student media.
I also know those people. Rodenbush, the now fired adviser, I worked alongside for about five years. That dean? I gave him a tour of the Media School when he was applying for the job. The last quote from that other guy? That quote makes perfect sense coming from him. Go read that again.
There are others in the Media School apparently involved, who are, frankly, not worth the time to type about.
Much will be made of budget issues. In the last few years, for budget reasons, the paper has endured staff cuts and slashed production runs. But student newsrooms are first and foremost learning laboratories. You must allow the students the opportunity to learn to produce so that they are adequately, appropriately, prepared. The building that houses the IDS has a tremendous print newsroom, three television studios, a half-dozen or so podcast studios and even more editing suites. You teach people their craft in these spaces. And, at Indiana, they have always learned it well. I can’t tell you how many Hearst Awards have been won under the IDS masthead, or how many Pulitzer Prize careers the newspaper has launched in its 158 years.
I can tell you this. Now, for editorial reasons, they’re killing the newsprint altogether. Hours after they fired Rodenbush, the university canceled the paper’s print run.
This is a laughable demonstration of university censorship, by any measure. This was a letter the editors wrote today:
The Media School is more focused on censorship than real solutions for student media. Is this really the best use of the university’s resources? Or of ours? Editorial decisions, including the contents of our print product, firmly lie in the hands of the students.
This is not about print. This is about a breach of editorial independence. If IU decides certain types of content are “bad for business,” what stops them from prohibiting stories that hold them to account on our other platforms?
None of this surprises me. I worked in student media for 15 years, including at IU. I defended outlets against censorship, including at IU. I know the low regard that some in The Media School have for student media. There’s often a tension between student media and a university administration, particularly an administration of small caliber. All of this is sad and unfortunate and inappropriate and illegal, but it is not unpredictable.
Jim Rodenbush, who is a real pro, knew this was turning bad. His firing is unfortunate for him and his family, but he’s a great colleague and good at what he does; he won’t be down long.
The student-journalists at IU will suffer. In fact, they already are.
Think of them. They are college students. They have a full course load. Some of them work jobs. They also have lives and responsibilities and their own amusements and problems. They spend some (sometimes a lot) of their free time learning their craft in student-media. They do this in public. They learn in public. They make their mistakes in public. They are often very impressive. They deserve respect. Instead, these people, at 20- or 21-years old feel as if they have targets on their backs. placed there by university and school administrators, people that seemingly do not understand journalism, censorship, the First Amendment, or the true value of student-journalists.
The student body, indeed, the city itself will lose out. Bloomington is almost a newspaper desert at this point. Public media, devastated nationally, is under all sorts of transitions on that campus — who knows what becomes of that. Major media is an hour up the road.
And now, the famed Indiana Daily Student — the third largest employer on campus, winner of 25 Pacemaker Awards (the collegiate equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and previously an incredible recruiting tool — has been reduced to a website and an app.
Letters are being written. IDS alumni are distributing a joint protest letter for signatures. There’s a formal alumni association letter in the works. The journalism faculty will speak up soon, I assume. The name of the great Ernie Pyle, the most famous IDS alumnus, will be invoked. The Student Press Law Center is poised. The story has just begun.
Students will cover it.
