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A few weeks back we ran a link to a piece about why student newspapers need to be online, adding a few thoughts of our own to the mix.
Well, we’ve just noticed that the Center for Innovation in College Media blog has been running a series of posts on the various updates and expansions that college papers have been undertaking this summer, and if you’re interested in online student media, it’s stuff that’s well worth checking out.
(Another recent CICM post that’s worth mentioning here is this one on college papers’ H1N1 flu coverage. The blog notes that more than a dozen campus papers have written about the flu, and that none of the articles it found include links to the CDC’s flu.gov site or other external sources of information. This fits with what we’ve seen of college papers’ work — they tend not to provide external links, even when doing to would add a lot of value to their stories.)
Via Kevin Prentiss (@kprentiss on Twitter) comes a link to the University of North Alabama’s Sidewalk Chalk Reservation Form.
The form states — in all caps, bolded, and underlined — that “chalking on university sidewalks requires reservations and approval from designated building supervisors or other assigned personnel.”
Chalking also requires, according to the form, advance notice and reservation of space. It requires compliance with a five-point list of restrictions, including a prohibition on chalking near doorways, near the university amphitheater, or with non-pastel chalk. “Chalking,” it states, “is only to be used to beautify the image of the UNA campus and to promote the organization using it.” Violation of any of the above rules will, according to the form, subject the organization responsible to a fine “in excess of $150.”
Over on Twitter, Kevin is a little abashed about linking to the form (“Apologies to the uni involved. I’m sure this is common.”), but I’ve got no such qualms. This is no way to run a university. Hell, it’d be no way to run a junior high.
The university is a community, and its public spaces are, in a very real sense, student space. If a little chalk dust gets tracked into the dining hall, or folks attending a concert at the amphitheater have to run a gauntlet of chalked announcements for Take Back the Night and the chemistry club semi-formal, that goes with the territory. It’s part of being a university.
UNA hands out the Sidewalk Chalk Reservation form — and free chalk! — at its Office of Student Engagement. But you can’t foster student engagement by treating students like guests. When you make students fill out a form to reserve sidewalk space for chalking. You’re telling them that they’re interlopers on campus. You’re telling them that this is your university, not theirs.
And you shouldn’t be surprised when they decide to take it back.
There’s a great article up at the MediaShift blog about student newspapers and online publishing.
According to one recent study, more than a third of college papers are still print-only. The MediaShift post looks at why that is, what the barriers to publishing online are, and why it’s so important to make the effort.
The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few excerpts:
Make no mistake, college news is a messy business. Students are learning, and their mistakes all too often show up in print. An online presence will broadcast those mistakes to the world, so the theory goes. Also, a college that supports student press freedoms when distributed to 2,000 people on campus might not be so keen to distribute “bad news” about the campus when the whole world is watching.
[But] staying offline is a disservice to student journalists who cannot use the online tools now widespread in the industry. A student who can’t put material online can’t really understand the impact of social networks like Twitter or Facebook to spread news. They can’t really understand what it is to create a personal brand. And they can’t really understand the challenges of multimedia production.
A college that will not allow their student journalists to practice online journalism in a “real world” setting is abandoning its commitment to education in order to save face. And that is a tragedy not only for the college, but for the students who look to higher education to prepare them for the future.
Good stuff. And I’d add that a paper-only student newspaper is going to lose on-campus readership, particularly at a commuter campus, sequester itself from broader regional and national debates, and cut itself and its readership off from its own history.
Keeping a student paper offline isn’t just a disservice to the students who work on the paper, it’s a disservice to students who are doing organizing and activism on the campus as well.
Update: Butch Oxendine makes some excellent points in comments. An excerpt:
[Student newspapers] will maintain their relevance by specifically writing about campus-based issues, problems, and news that no one else is covering and reporting on. They will maintain their relevance by pulling the plug on the use of “wire” service reports from the Associated Press, etc.
Student newspapers must evolve. They’re not doing it well now. In tight economic times, more of them every year are being shut down. If they don’t have a web presence, they won’t be ready for this transition.
A Mississippi student is suing her high school after a cheerleading coach demanded her Facebook password, then used it to access and disseminate private email.
According to the lawsuit the coach, Tommie Hill, told the Pearl High School cheerleading squad that they would all have to give her their Facebook passwords. Several squad members responded by deleting their accounts from their cell phones, but sophomore Mandi Jackson complied with the request.
The suit claims that Hill accessed Jackson’s account later that day, and forwarded Jackson’s private Facebook messages to at least four other school officials. The officials then “publicly reprimanded … and humiliated” Jackson, suspended her from cheerleader training, and banned her from other school events.
Jackson’s attorney, Rita Nahlik Silin, told the Student Press Law Center that Hill’s actions were “a blatant violation of her right to privacy, her right to free speech, her right to free association and her right to due process. It’s egregious to me,” she said, “that a 14-year-old girl is essentially told you can’t speak your mind, can’t publish anything, can’t be honest or have an open discussion with someone without someone else essentially eavesdropping.”
As Lee Baker of the Citizen Media Law Project notes, this incident reflects a not-uncommon belief on the part of authority figures that “they have the right to invade others’ privacy and eavesdrop on private or semi-private conversations merely because these conversations take place online.” In Baker’s words, “asking for a student’s Facebook password in order to read private messages is akin to asking the student’s permission to install a wiretap on his or her phone.”
With Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings getting underway this morning, now seems like as good a time as any to revisit the Supreme Court nominee’s past as a student activist.
The Daily Princetonian has posted seven letters and articles by or about Sotomayor from her undergraduate days, and taken together they reveal her to be a committed advocate for Latinos and Latinas on campus, an opponent of anti-gay violence, and as the recipient of the university’s highest undergraduate honor for her “dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton.”
In a May 10, 1974 letter, Sotomayor explained a complaint filed by “the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton” alleging “an institutional pattern of discrimination” at the university. In it she noted that there were then only 31 Puerto Rican and 27 Chicano students enrolled at Princeton, and rebuked the university for its “total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture.” (Sotomayor is quoted in two Daily Princetonian articles on the complaint as well.)
In a letter published on September 12, 1974, Sotomayor and five other student advisors to a search for a new assistant dean for student affairs laid out their criticism of the lack of direct student involvement in the search and the racial and ethnic dynamics of the process. (Sotomayor is quoted directly on the controversy here.)
In a group letter from February 27, 1976, Sotomayor and 38 other members of the campus community condemned the recent vandalism of a dorm room that was home to two students active in the Gay Alliance of Princeton.
And on February 28, 1976, it was announced that Sotomayor was one of two co-recipients of Princeton’s M. Taylor Pine Honor Prize, “the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.” The Princetonian article on the honor referred to Sotomayor as having “maintained almost straight A’s for the last two years, but” being “especially known for her extracurricular activities.” (The photo at above right accompanied this article.) A follow-up piece two days later noted that Sotomayor was the first Latino student to win the award.
studentactivism.net 
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