University of Virginia Library

Monitoring The Press

We had thought that the over-worked
Appropriations Committee of the Virginia
House of Delegates already had enough to
occupy its time, without monitoring student
newspapers. We were wrong, evidently.

According to the committee's chairman,
Del. W. Roy Smith Jr. of Petersburg, the
unit's 20 members don't intend to exert any
censorship over student publications. No, sir.
Rather, he explains, they're simply concerned
about the fairness of requiring all students on
a campus to pay a compulsory activities fee
for the support of papers with "low
standards.'

Ideally, each college newspaper should be
subsidized only by its readers and advertisers;
as a practical matter, however, almost no
campus paper can survive without a
guaranteed share of student-body fees. In
fact, it's tough enough getting students to
read campus papers when each copy is free: if
students had to pay for them on a single-issue
basis, almost none of the papers would
survive.

Del. Smith and his Assembly colleagues
may therefore be proposing a subtle, but
nonetheless highly effective, form of state
censorship of campus papers. And even if
nothing were to come of the threatened-cut-off
of compulsory publications fees, there
would still be a real danger of a "chilling
effect," as the courts call it, on what student
editors can print at tax-supported colleges.
Indeed, merely by asking the colleges to put
all its members on the mailing lists for student
publication, the Appropriations Committee
has laid down an implied threat of statehouse
interference in campus affairs.

What has the assemblymen in a dither,
apparently, is the appearance in a couple of
campus papers recently of news stories that
dealt with such once-taboo subjects as
abortion and birth control methods, and the
occasional resort to four-letter words that
heretofore have been seen mostly in the
underground press, on stage, in a few literary
magazines, and on graffiti walls.

We have yet to understand why some
student editors go out of their way to shock
middle-class attitudes by proving affinity for
the obscene-speech movement. On the other
hand, we're delighted to see budding
journalists trying to turn college papers into
something more than a campus calendar of
coming events, spiced only with weekly gripes
about dormitory food and parking, and a
sophomoric outburst of boosterism for the
school's winless basketball team.

Frankly, we don't think Del. Smith—or
anybody else on the Appropriations
Committee-is in a position to pass on the
"standards' of college papers. Neither, for
that matter, do we think the committee has
any business poking around in any internal,
administrative affair involving the state
colleges. If legislators want to run the colleges,
they ought to quit the Assembly and apply
for a college presidency; goodness knows,
with all the resignations of college presidents
these days, there's certainly a plethora of
vacancies waiting to be filled.

Short of that, assemblymen ought to stick
to their traditional duties, and leave the
content of college papers to campus opinion
and the courts. Excesses will occur,
inevitably; but that, after all, is what a college's
learning process is all about.

Take away the college papers' financial
support, Del. Smith, and you will destroy the
papers-or, more likely, simply make them
irrelevant.

— Ed.