A committee composed of representatives from the American Association of University Professors, the College Media Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the Student Press Law Center formulated this joint statement in fall 2016. The document received the endorsement of all four sponsoring organizations.
In 2015, the Black Lives Matter movement spawned protests on college and university campuses from coast to coast as students, faculty, and staff sought to draw attention to what they perceived as institutional racism in higher education. The glare of the national spotlight revealed genuine problems and had real consequences, with policy changes enacted and university presidents stepping down.
The movement also shone light on the status of student journalists and their faculty and staff advisers, as demonstrated by an incident involving a faculty member and a student videographer at the University of Missouri and by one involving the student newspaper at Wesleyan University.1 While unusual for the attention they garnered, these incidents were by no means unique or even rare. It has become disturbingly routine for student journalists and their advisers to experience overt hostility that threatens their ability to inform the campus community and, in some instances, imperils their careers or the survival of their publications, as the sampling of cases discussed in this report demonstrates. Administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to provide a space for intellectual exploration and debate.