FACULTY REQUIRING MINDERS?

I'm not sure what to make of a Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression story out of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Student journalists with The Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville wanted to do something reporters do every day: interview university employees.

But SIUE’s communications office insisted on coming along and sitting in on multiple interviews between Alestle journalists and university staff. When a student journalist tried to arrange a solo interview, the director of communications said her presence was “non-negotiable” and that “approval of the interview is ultimately [her] decision.”

A branch campus of a directional state university with a history of corruption might be so placed on the academic food chain that one might wonder whether the minders are to protect the faculty from being exposed as career minor leaguers or to protect the students from doing the sort of thing Normal's rejects might do.

The one Alestle report on the imbroglio is not reassuring.

Senior System Counsel Phyleccia Reed Cole sent a letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Student Press Law Center. Cole’s Sept. 2 response, which can be viewed in full here, indicates that SIUE is maintaining its position on The Alestle.

Cole wrote that Marketing and Communications “remains ready to work in good faith with The Alestle, its adviser and student reporters.” Cole repeated SIUE’s claim that administration’s problems with The Alestle are not content-related.Discrimination of speech based on its content is prohibited by the First Amendment.

“The issue at hand for the university has never been its commitment to free speech or freedom of the press but, rather, repeated inaccuracies in The Alestle’s published reports and their reluctance, and in some cases failure, to correct inaccurate information,” Cole wrote.

She did not specify any inaccuracies or instances in which The Alestle refused to correct true inaccuracies. Emails published in Executive Director of University Marketing and Communications Paula Bridges’ July 27 open letter also demonstrate that this claim is untrue.

Cole also alleged that The Alestle was feeding FIRE and SPLC “false information” due to a line in the first letter saying that Director of Communications Nicole Franklin had recorded a July 9 interview without The Alestle’s knowledge. What The Alestle had told FIRE and SPLC was that it was not known before the interview that Franklin would ask to record.

I'm not sure from the story what role Southern Poverty Law Center play in the appointment of minders.  The Foundation set up a table on the Edwardsville campus Wednesday last, apparently without incident.