Practice What You Teach, Long Island

By: Allan Wolper It was pure journalism satire, held appropriately last April Fool's Day, on the stage of the HBO Theater in midtown Manhattan. There was David J. Steinberg, president of Long Island University (LIU), posturing as a protector of the First Amendment and free speech.

There Steinberg stood, waxing poetic about The George Polk Awards In Journalism ? bestowed each year by LIU to those who expose wrongdoing ? while professors in the audience mumbled about hypocrisy. As he spoke I recalled that just two months earlier, LIU, in a sneak attack on free speech, changed the locks of the student newspaper office, forced it to close down for a month, suspended its editor, and fired its adviser for daring to publish the failing grades of the student council president. Hardly the behavior of a First-Amendment fan. Especially since that adviser, G. Michael Bush, was hired as a Polk Award Journalist-in-Residence to teach LIU students how to practice hard-nosed journalism.

But no one wanted to ruin the night for the Polk winners at the seminar, so everyone held their tongues, including Bush, who sat in the auditorium and simmered.

"The LIU administration doesn't give a damn about the First Amendment," Bush recently told me. "I wonder how they can call themselves a university. The whole thing soured me on academe."

That LIU would censor a professor that the Polk Awards committee had appointed also embarrassed the administrator of the prestigious national award. "The administration acted stupidly and impulsively," said Robert Spector, enlightening me with a pungent version of a two-page letter of protest he wrote to LIU Provost Gale Stevens Haynes and copied to Steinberg.

The stories on the LIU contretemps in the Associated Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times missed the internal mess of a system at the school that created the controversy. Those stories focused on a legal question: Did the student paper violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act by publishing the student's grades? And was it ethical, even if it was legal?

The professional news media reported that the U.S. Department of Education had said repeatedly that campus journalists can do so, and noted many have printed the grades of high-profile students. But the pros did not know that the LIU journalism department had authored a relationship with the student paper that made a university assault on the paper inevitable. In this system, student reporters write their stories in a journalism classroom and the adviser later edits them after they are submitted to the paper. That teaches students to abdicate their independence, not exercise it.

The LIU journalism faculty believes that polishing the raw copy of the students gives them a better chance of getting a sought-after internship or job. What it also does is create a false impression about the quality of the clips and the students who write them. "That's not student journalism," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. "You do not find a reputable student newspaper where that kind of editing occurs."

This system has turned Seawanhaka, the LIU student newspaper, into a faculty news laboratory. Adding another censorship factor, LIU gives the campus editor a scholarship worth 75% of his tuition. That's like putting the editor of The Washington Post on the White House payroll.

When LIU took away that scholarship to punish the student editor in the current flap, the news media roared its indignation and the school reversed itself. But that system remains intact. LIU officials love it; it allows them to rush their censorship troops into the campus newsroom whenever they feel like it. After all, they reason, the student paper is nothing more than an arm of the university. And LIU tells me they are not going to change the system.

So when LIU found out that Bush, the paper's adviser, had taken the grades of the student council president and e-mailed them to Seawanhaka Editor in Chief Justin Grant, they acted. They went after Bush. And got him. However, they could have waited. Bush had announced last fall that he was leaving anyway, worn out from three years of protecting the student paper from allegedly intrusive administrators.

The LIU journalism department ought to realize that Seawanhaka will remain vulnerable to even more attacks unless it allows students to fully express themselves, edit their own copy, and get paid by ad revenues generated by the paper, not by the administration.