Strong-arming student journalists

The Northwestern quotes UW Oshkosh Vice Chancellor of Students Affairs Petra Roter as saying she was “very proud” of student editors for the way they handled complaints about their April Fool’s edition.

It would be nice if we could be proud of the way university administrators acted during this episode, which resulted in the editors yanking the edition off the Internet (although it lingers through the Google cache function) and publishing an apology to those whom it offended.

The editors were summoned to a meeting in the chancellor’s office last Wednesday after a complaint from a nontraditional student set off an amplifying storm of complaints, mostly from faculty members, which threatened to swamp e-mail inboxes all over campus. The meeting included Roter, Chancellor Richard Wells and the university’s recently hired image keeper, Jeanette DeDiemar.

It turns out that the university’s Journalism Department was also invited to sit in on the meeting, but the invitation was declined. (Although I am an associate professor in the department, I didn’t learn about the invitation until Friday afternoon. ’Nother story.)

Instead of not taking part, the department should have spoken up for the students and told the higher level administrators that whatever they wanted to accomplish they could have done so without resorting to strong-arm tactics and trying to bully the students in a semi-public forum.

The April Fool’s edition was clearly not the A-T’s brightest shining moment. Inadvertently the staff’s parodies and satires ended up offending some of the very people whose causes it was attempting to advance and whose causes it regularly takes up. (There’s nothing wrong with a newspaper offending people, but it’s better to do it in a controlled, purposeful way.)

Wells, and others on campus, say that they wanted to turn the incident into a “teachable moment.” I am sure that they did, but they should think twice about what lessons they were teaching.

If they think the message they sent was about the importance of creating a welcoming campus climate for all, they are mistaken. From all this mess, a lot of students cannot help but see just how little their teachers think of them—and I don’t think that will make them feel very welcome.

(If UW-O was so concerned about being welcoming, where was the outcry when Akosua Nyo Agryiriwah, a 46-year-old member of the Voices of Africa, was busted in her room in Gruenhagen Hall last month? The UP really knows how to put out the welcome mat.)

One thing that the administration did very successfully was deflect the important criticisms about various university policies that were in the April Fool’s issue, which included satirical and unflattering portraits of Roter and Wells.

Let’s face it: We have a chancellor who appears to be perpetually in pursuit of a better job all the while insisting that he loves Oshkosh and thinks the rest of us should do more to make it a great university. This point was parodied in an article about Wells taking a job at Taco John’s.

Another satirical article and one that got a lot of blood boiling on campus used the mannered speech of rap artists and was interpreted as stereotyping and belittling black people. The intent, however, was to point out that the university simply does not put its money where its mouth is.

We say we value things like diversity and academic excellence, but look what we raise money to construct—a new playing field at the football stadium, a parking ramp and a student wellness center. I think if we really care about diversity and academic excellence we would spend some money addressing the structural factors that inhibit our ability to reach our stated goals. (Yes, I know planning is under way for a new academic building, but that process is highly contingent on attracting local funds and is clearly a lower priority for the administration.)

Another parodic article that drew the ire of some was focused on the Women’s Center. I suppose you could, if you worked at it, declare this an attack on feminism. But shouldn’t we be more concerned with the way that we continue to fill high level academic and administrative posts with middle-age white males?

In the university’s largest college, the College of Letters and Science, the newly appointed dean and his two associate deans are white males. Their immediate boss is the provost, also a middle-age white male. Above the provost is Wells, also a you-know-what.

The fact is that making real substantive change on a college campus is hard work. It requires energy, money, motivation and heart. What’s a lot easier is cranking up a PR machine that constructs an image of a positive, progressive campus.

There are indications that what really set the administration off was a concern that the A-T’s April Fool’s issue would damage the university’s slowly improving reputation. The board of regents will be in town for a two-day meeting next week, and I guess there was a worry that unless the A-T was put in its place there might be some lingering embarrassment.

My main criticism of the A-T in all this that it has not adequately covered the controversy. The staff owes it to itself and to the campus to provide a full airing of the controversy, including student reaction, faculty reaction and administration reaction.

And if that airing were to appear on a day when the regents are in town, all the better.