Some campus journalism is becoming quite good, particularly on the alternative, largely conservative, side. Part of this results from the donor base of alternative college newspapers vis-à-vis official organs. That is, while the former largely survive on outside contributions, the latter are usually dependent on school funding.
Thus, while student journalists working for their house papers strive for independence and objectivity, they eventually have to confront the “Whose bread I eat, his song I sing” phenomenon. Alternative university newspapers are free from this potential constraint by college officials.
The Carolina Review, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is one of these renegade newspapers providing a necessary check and balance on the public relations machinery in the Ivory Tower in the Research Triangle. Another valuable alternative press entity is The Counterweight at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.
The staffers of The Counterweight even do a round-up of events on other campuses. “While Taliban officials are welcomed at Yale, ROTC training has been banned, and Yale law has argued for the right to exclude military recruiters from campus,” associate editor Dominic Ruprecht reports. “One outraged Yale alumnus has declared that she will immediately cease all monetary contributions to her alma mater, and instead—in the spirit of the Taliban who pulled the fingernails off Afghan women who dared to wear nail polish—would be sending a red press-on nail to the school.”
“To join her efforts, direct your mail to:
President Richard C. Levin
Woodbridge Hall
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut 06520”
“Jennifer Jones was recently crowned Homecoming King for Hood College, a small private liberal arts college in Maryland,” Bucknell sophomore Casey Bryant reports. “Jones, a lesbian, saw it as a step in the right direction for the college, but not all of her classmates applauded the crowning.”
“Jones won 64 of the 169 votes cast, beating out three male students for the title.”
Meanwhile, at Bowdoin College in Maine, at least one student concluded that the college’s push for diversity and inclusiveness does not include him. “I have encountered anti-Christian hostility at Bowdoin since my first semester, when I was enrolled in a philosophy course entitled ‘Does God Exist,’” Ryan Helminiak writes in The Pachyderm Press. “During class time, the professor asked me, ‘What are you doing at Bowdoin?’ and further harassed me throughout the semester.”
“He implied that someone with my strong religious beliefs should not be at a liberal arts school.”
When Helminiak took a semester off, he came back to find that things only got worse. His next professor went beyond implication.
“My suspicion of anti-Christian hostility at Bowdoin was confirmed in a religion class entitled ‘Early Christian Literature’ in which the professor desecrated the Holy Bible on the first day of class,” Helminiak recounts. “She sarcastically said, ‘Some people think that the Bible is a sacred book’ and then threw a Bible to the floor.”
When Helminiak attempted to distribute Christian tracts on campus, he found that free speech protections in the Student Handbook apparently did not apply to him. He got fined.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
