Copyright 2005, Chico Enterprise-Record

Weekly newspaper pulls offending article to get its edition back in student packets

By Ari Cohn

(CHICO, July 9) -- Chico State University may have violated the First Amendment, while a local alternative newspaper could be criticized for caving in to advertisers and college officials by withdrawing an article critical of the school, a freedom of speech expert said Friday.

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said the university may have crossed a line if it seized copies of newspapers and locked them away on the third floor of a campus building - an allegation the school denies.

But the newspaper, the Chico News & Review, also erred by agreeing to replace a scathing critique of the college's party atmosphere with a bland welcome message from University President Paul Zingg, Scheer said.

The News & Review, a local weekly not affiliated with Chico State, has reached an agreement with the university over a controversial article published in the newspaper's 2005 "Goin' Chico" city guide.

The edition carried the article "The party rules" by writer Josh Indar. Among other things, the piece includes recent tragedies like the death of a fraternity pledge during an alleged hazing incident and the strangulation of a newborn baby by its mother, who was a sorority member.

Some of the article's phrasing was too graphic for university officials, who said it could damage the school's image and frighten off new students. In response, the college pulled the entire city guide from its student orientation packets, which are distributed to prospective students and their parents and contain information on city and college services.

But the newspaper had promised advertisers that "Goin' Chico" would be distributed in the orientation packets, said News & Review Editor Tom Gascoyne. So the newspaper and the school came to an agreement: replace the disputed article with a welcome address from Zingg, and the issues would be placed back into the packets, Gascoyne said.

"We came to an agreement because we want to get these things distributed," he said. "We promised our advertisers that they were going out in the packets. We want to make good with that."

The deal, however, required the reprinting of about 3,000 copies of pages containing the Zingg essay, Gascoyne said. He said people at the college replaced Indar's article with Zingg's for the orientation packet editions. The original editions are still available, and the paper plans to put out another 45,000 copies with Indar's article as an insert in its regular paper in August.

"The paper is still out there," Gascoyne said. "It's unfortunate the whole thing came to that, but the irony is that the original issue is getting more attention than any other copy of RGoin' Chico'."

Bob Hannigan, Chico State's vice provost for enrollment management, said the original article didn't represent the institution.

"The News & Review called and said they'd like to reprint RGoin' Chico,'" he said. "We said yes. RGoin' Chico' is now in there."

Scheer said it appears the newspaper is trying to "have it all ways."

"It certainly does give the appearance that they censored themselves," he said. "I think the newspaper might be fairly criticized for not having disclosed in this reissue some type of notice to the reader saying Radvertisement,' Radvertorial' or Runiversity-approved.' But that's an editorial decision."

Even though Chico State is a government entity, it can't be called censorship if the school merely refused to distribute the original orientation packets, he said.

"The First Amendment does not oblige the university to distribute what it does not want to distribute. There is a difference between tolerating someone's expression of free speech and having to affirmatively endorse it and spread it," Scheer said.

"It would be more of a problem if the school took more measures to prevent students from seeing the issue. If they tried to remove the offending article from newsstands that normally would carry that publication, that would be a problem."

But that's exactly what Gascoyne has said the university did. Gascoyne said he and others had to go and get copies of "Goin' Chico" from a locked room on the third floor of the campus O'Connell Technology Center, although university officials have denied removing the papers from the Bell Memorial Auditorium.

"That they shouldn't have done," Scheer said of the university. "I see that as a censorship issue. They're trying to prevent students from having access."

Indar said he doesn't feel that his article has been censored.

"In fact, because it has become so controversial, it's probably gotten the widest distribution of anything I've ever written," he wrote in an e-mail Friday. "Way more people have read the piece now than would have ever seen it had the university not decided to pull it from orientation."