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[IP] more on On Kansas State -- Black and White and Mad All Over





Begin forwarded message:

From: Gerry Faulhaber <gerry-faulhaber@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 30, 2004 10:48:05 PM EDT
To: Tom Davis <tdavis@xxxxxxxxx>
Cc: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Your IP post

Thanks for yor thoughtful response.  I wish the original post had been as thoughtful and complete, and I certainly would have responded differently.
 
Prof. Gerald Faulhaber
 
----- Original Message -----
 From: Tom Davis
To: gerry-faulhaber@xxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 11:12 PM
Subject: Your IP post

Dear Mr.. Faulhaber:
 
Saw your IP post.  My son attends KSU, so I've followed this story.  First, the Student Press Law Center is an independent group in VA, not in any way connected with KSU.  The Chronicle of Higher Ed has covered this story very well.  Ron Johnson was given an exemplary job review just 2-3 months before he was sacked.  See below.  President Wefald should be ashamed of himself to sponsor this argument in court.  Tom Davis
 

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From the issue dated July 2, 2004

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http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i43/43a01001.htm

Black and White and Mad All Over
The ouster of Kansas State U.'s newspaper director has college-journalism advisers seeing red

By ERIC HOOVER


Manhattan, Kan.

This spring Kansas State University published a job listing for an interim director of student publications, inviting applicants who have a master's degree in journalism or a related field and the ability to "work well with students."

An ability to please all of the readers all of the time was not on that list of requirements. But campus-media directors across the nation say it might as well have been.

In May Kansas State ousted its longtime journalism adviser, Ron Johnson, who had received a shining evaluation just two months earlier. He contends that administrators' dissatisfaction with the coverage of minority students in the student-run newspaper, the Collegian, was what led to his dismissal. University officials maintain that it was a personnel decision, not a question of content.

Mr. Johnson's removal is the latest flare-up in a continuing clash over the role of collegiate newspaper advisers, who walk one of the narrowest planks in academe.

Part teachers, part collaborators, part critics, advisers generally lack the protections of mainstream faculty members, yet receive more scrutiny. Because student newspapers are flash points for campus tensions over many issues, media advisers often take heat -- and get fired -- for decisions made by the student journalists they oversee but do not control.

In April, for example, the trustees of Barton County Community College, in Kansas, decided not to renew the contract of the campus newspaper's adviser, Jennifer Schartz, after she had refused to stop the paper from publishing a letter critical of the basketball coach. And in May, Vincennes University reassigned its adviser, Michael Mullen, who says the move was an attempt to silence the student newspaper, which had published articles critical of the administration last semester. (Officials of both colleges deny that the decisions were related to news coverage).

More than other recent controversies, however, Mr. Johnson's dismissal at Kansas State jolted the tight-knit ranks of media advisers. A soft-spoken leader in the field, he had advised the Collegian for 15 years, a time during which the paper racked up many awards, including one in March as best broadsheet daily in a national competition of college newspapers. If such a decorated veteran could not keep his job, was any adviser safe?

In 1998, in response to a growing number of adviser-administrator confrontations, the College Media Advisers, a national organization representing journalism instructors, established an "Adviser Advocate Policy," which allows members to call on trained advocates for help in resolving dispute with colleges.

Members of the group met with Kansas State officials this spring in an effort to win Mr. Johnson's reinstatement. When that failed, the group voted to censure the university, calling it "oppressive of students' rights to free expression and hostile toward those professionals it employs to advise the student press."

"I'm starting to worry that we're in an atmosphere of less tolerance," says Kathy Lawrence, the group's president, who is director of student media at the University of Texas at Austin. "If an adviser can be removed for the content of a student newspaper -- which they're not supposed to control -- then we know there's a real serious problem there, and a real serious problem for advisers in general."

'Turn Them Loose'

Ron Johnson understood the pressures of the profession when he stepped into it two decades ago, back when he had a lot more hair and a hankering for a job where the hours are as different as each day's news.

After receiving a master's degree in journalism from the University of Kansas in 1982, he taught high-school English for two years and worked as a special-projects writer at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon for another year. Then, in 1985, he traded his byline for a chance to teach students who were still too young to drink how to break news and make deadlines.

He became adviser to the student newspaper at his alma mater, Fort Hays State University. Four years later he signed on as Kansas State's director of student publications to oversee production of the Collegian, which comes out Monday through Friday, with a circulation of 11,000, as well as of the university's yearbook, the Royal Purple, and the campus telephone directory.

Mr. Johnson had a dual appointment, serving both as director of Student Publications Inc., the nonprofit corporation that publishes the newspaper, and as an assistant professor not on the tenure track, in the university's A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications.

He began each day by writing critiques of the previous day's issue of the Collegian. Many nights ended with telephone calls from editors seeking his advice. Students recall that when he took them aside to criticize their work, he would preface his remarks by saying, "I love you, but ...."

Some nights Mr. Johnson would drop by the newspaper's office, in Kedzie Hall, with plates of warm chocolate-chip cookies. When high winds from a tornado ripped a hole in the roof of the building, in the summer of 1993, he helped students salvage 6,000 copies of the newspaper from a fast-flooding basement.

But he was hands-off about the content of the newspaper. As for many other advisers, the job required him to lead young journalists without giving them orders on what to report and write. At public colleges, like Kansas State, the First Amendment prevents advisers from interfering with media content because that would be tantamount to the state's taking action to restrict free speech. "Legally speaking, an adviser stands in the same shoes as a university president," says Mike Hiestand, a lawyer based in Bellingham, Wash., who specializes in student-media cases. "Once the adviser imposes some sort of directive on editorial content, there's going to be a problem."

Mr. Johnson believes that journalism is a practice best learned by students who are free to make mistakes. "You're giving advice, but you're not pulling strings," he says of the adviser's role. "You train 'em and you turn them loose."

Tempest on a T-Shirt

Mr. Johnson's troubles began in February, following the 27th annual Big 12 Conference on Black Student Government, which drew more than 1,000 visiting students to Kansas State's campus. Natalie Rolfe, president of the campus Black Student Union at the time, says members became upset when the Collegian failed to cover any of the conference's events, most of which had taken place in the student union, just across from the building housing the newspaper's office.

Complaints among minority students about the Collegian's coverage of diversity issues predated Ms. Rolfe's arrival at Kansas State, where 3 percent of the student population is black. But the lack of reporting on the conference, which was held during Black History Month, prompted her to act.

Ms. Rolfe helped organize two forums, on February 26 and March 2, at which administrators, faculty members, and student leaders of campus groups discussed their concerns about the Collegian with its editors. Mr. Johnson attended the second meeting. A lack of diversity on the newspaper was among their criticisms: The Collegian had no black staff members last semester.

Some students demanded to know why the newspaper had given more coverage to a campus rodeo this spring than to a gathering of black student leaders.

"Every student wants to feel like they have a voice in the newspaper," says Ms. Rolfe, who graduated in May with a degree in journalism and mass communications. "We were not trying to take away anybody's First Amendment rights, but to put in a system to make sure the paper's more friendly to the campus."

After the editors apologized -- both at the forums and in print -- for not covering the conference, Mr. Johnson became the target of Ms. Rolfe's continuing campaign. Her thinking was that students, who come and go, were not solely to blame for what she describes as the Collegian's long-term problems, and that a "regime change" was necessary.

So she ordered dozens of orange T-shirts with a message on the front -- "W.W.R.G.?," for "When Will Ron Go?" On April 7, she and about 50 other students donned the T-shirts and marched through the campus to call for Mr. Johnson's resignation.

"He wasn't fixing anything," Ms. Rolfe says.

The students who challenged Mr. Johnson had the support of one of Kansas State's top administrators, Myra Gordon, the associate provost for diversity and dual-career development. Ms. Rolfe says that when she first discussed her plans to hold the forums about the Collegian with Ms. Gordon, the administrator told her, "I'm backing you all the way."

Ms. Gordon, who works regularly with students, stated publicly on at least one occasion that Mr. Johnson should be removed from his job. In late April, she told the Collegian that "nothing less than an enduring solution" would defuse frustrations with the newspaper's coverage.

Ms. Gordon is a former associate dean at Virginia Tech, where she led a controversial initiative in 1999 to diversify the faculty through revamped hiring procedures that were designed to bring in more female and minority professors (The Chronicle, July 12, 2002).

This spring some members of the Collegian's staff say they were stung by what they describe as the associate provost's insinuations that they -- and Mr. Johnson -- were racist. Ms. Gordon declined The Chronicle's, request for a telephone interview. After saying she would consider answering only written questions, she did not respond to questions sent to her via e-mail.

'A Comprehensive Review'

In early April, the complaints about Mr. Johnson were buzzing in the ears of Todd F. Simon, director of Kansas State's journalism school, who had overseen Mr. Johnson in his roles as both media adviser and assistant professor.

If Mr. Simon had concerns about the adviser, though, they had not shown up in recent job reviews. In a March 15 evaluation, for instance, the director concluded that Mr. Johnson "exceeds expectations" and deemed his three-year performance "meritorious."

But in a May 7 letter to Stephen E. White, dean of the college of arts and sciences, Mr. Simon recommended that Mr. Johnson not be reappointed as adviser to the newspaper or to his teaching position.

Mr. Simon's letter followed a "content analysis" in which he attempted to quantify the weaknesses of the Collegian by comparing it with six other college newspapers. His conclusion: The Kansas State newspaper "ranked low in many measures of news coverage," including stories with a campus focus and in the number of sources per article.

He noted that the award the Collegian won in March was based on a single day's newspaper, which, he wrote, was "not representative of a typical issue." (His letter does not mention that the newspaper recently won separate awards that were based on multiple issues.) Mr. Simon wrote that although the recent complaints about the Collegian's coverage of diversity were not the basis of his recommendation, the "comprehensive review would not have occurred without the controversy having arisen."

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Simon explains that previously he had not noticed what he describes as serious problems with the Collegian, because he had been only "a casual reader" of the newspaper.

He contends that Mr. Johnson's concept of an adviser's role -- teaching by sharing critiques after the fact -- is too narrow. In the director's view, advisers should not "tell people, 'Go cover the following five stories,' but they build up over time a response from students that [the adviser] expects us to cover X, Y, and Z."

Mr. Simon, himself a longtime advocate of student-press freedom who once threatened to sue on behalf of the Collegian when the student government attempted to exercise control over the newspaper, rejects accusations that he has trampled on First Amendment rights.

His concerns about Mr. Johnson, he says, were related not only to content but also to conduct. In his letter to the dean, he wrote that "dozens of individuals have offered opinions that are consistent in their portrayal of Johnson as antagonistic, disrespectful, adversarial, and distrustful. ..." Mr. Simon declined to offer more specifics in an interview but insists that his findings were sound. "While this is a dicey situation," he says, "I haven't stepped over the line."

A 'Feeling of Pride'

Katie Lane, a senior who was editor in chief of the Collegian last semester, contends that Mr. Simon did go too far. She does not understand why the journalism school's director, who consulted with several student groups about Mr. Johnson this spring, did not seek the opinions of the newspaper's staff members, many of whom rave about him.

Although she knew of a few students who did not like Mr. Johnson's teaching style, she says, the vast majority supported him, as well as his light advising touch. "When you walked into that newsroom, you knew it was your paper," she says. "The feeling of pride in that is just unbelievable."

Ms. Lane says the Collegian "dropped the ball" by not covering the black-leadership conference, which she attributes to an oversight by staff members. But, she adds, the newspaper has responded to the criticism by developing a beat system and planning additional diversity training.

Mark Witherspoon, editorial adviser at Iowa State University's student newspaper, recently met with Kansas State officials to discuss Mr. Johnson's case on behalf of the College Media Advisers. In addition to lobbying for Mr. Johnson's reinstatement as adviser, the group is also suggesting ways to improve the relationship between the university and the newspaper.

Mr. Witherspoon sees some problems at Kansas State as structural. Under the newspaper's current setup, for instance, Mr. Simon, an administrator, is also chairman of the publications board, which is supposed to function independently of the university. "There's some intermingling there," Mr. Witherspoon says. "Papers become financially independent so they can avoid this."

Amid criticism from students and alumni who support Mr. Johnson, the university's president, Jon Wefald, recently signed a "declaration of commitment" to the freedom of its student press, affirming that the university would "never order or pressure an adviser to coerce a student staff's editorial decisions."

Kansas State has temporarily shelved its search for an adviser after the newspaper's governing board passed a resolution condemning Mr. Johnson's removal, which occurred without its consent. Linda Puntney, who was assistant director of student publications, has been named acting director.

Ms. Puntney, who could not be reached for comment, told the Student Press Law Center, a watchdog group, that she hoped the university would reinstate Mr. Johnson. If his removal "is, in fact, a content-related issue, we are in deep trouble at Kansas State University," she said. "If it is not a content issue, I'd like to know more about what it is."

High Expectations

On a Thursday afternoon in June, Mr. Johnson's campus office is almost empty. Although he is no longer the newspaper's adviser, a member of the Collegian's summer staff drops in anyway to ask his advice on getting an evasive source to talk. "What do you think would happen," the student asks, "if I just knocked on his door?"

Mr. Johnson lets the question linger. Clearly the student has decided to go find out for himself.

For now, Mr. Johnson plans to remain at Kansas State. Mr. White, the arts-and-sciences dean, moved him into a full-time teaching position in the journalism school. Mr. White says that despite his concerns about the professor's "interpersonal relationships with different groups," which he declines to describe, he is confident that Mr. Johnson is "a very effective teacher."

Mr. Johnson says some of students' frustration with the Collegian is inevitable. On a large campus, he argues, a newspaper cannot possibly cover every group's event or every speaker who visits. That said, he agrees that the newspaper's failure to report on the black-leadership conference was a mistake. He also concedes that the Collegian could have done a better job covering race issues in general and in recruiting a more-diverse staff.

"I don't fault readers for having high expectations," he says.

But he does fault the university for not giving him the opportunity to help students improve the newspaper or to respond to the "interpersonal" issues to which Mr. White refers. Mr. Johnson insists that he does not know what those issues are. "If these were problems," he says, "how come I was only hearing about it now?"

Mr. Simon, director of the journalism school, told The Chronicle that giving Mr. Johnson another chance "wouldn't have led to the desired result."

To the professor, that is further evidence that he is a casualty of what he describes as the growing "customer-service mentality" of higher education, in which campus controversies require scapegoats. "I have every reason to believe the administration understands the role of adviser," he says. "It's just that they're not accepting it."

Across the hall from his office, the Collegian's newsroom is silent, but the ceiling has plenty to say. For decades graduating students have scribbled messages and quotations on the tiles.

Mr. Johnson meanders, rattling off students' names as he squints up. "That's good," he says, pointing at one inscription: "Fight fires with words. Words are hotter than flames."

But none of the messages fits the mood better than the one that a student wrote 10 years ago in black ink. "Newspapers," it reads, "will always break your heart."

http://chronicle.com
Section: The Faculty
Volume 50, Issue 43, Page A10


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