It was vindictive, misguided, and almost certainly illegal. When
the UC Santa Barbara student government cut off the campus
newspaper’s funding, it crossed the line from criticism to
censorship.
The Associated Students Legislative Council at UCSB voted
Wednesday to freeze the funds the Daily Nexus receives from student
fees after it ran an advertisement from a company being boycotted
by the student government.
The council justified their actions through a section in the
council’s legal code that allows them to chop funding for an
affiliated organization that breaches a boycott.
But what the councilmembers say is part of the fight against an
unjust company is also a way for them to censor an important
student resource that does not fit the council’s political
agenda.
Mark Goodman, director of the Student Press Law Center, said
there is no question the council’s actions were illegal.
“Anyone who’s interested in getting truthful,
accurate information from that paper should be up in arms about
this,” he said.
As Goodman points out, this is an issue that needs to be looked
at from a general perspective. If the student government were
allowed to punish the paper for ads they don’t like,
what’s to stop them from censoring news content or opinions
they don’t like?
At the same meeting where the student council voted to freeze
The Nexus’ student fees, they also discussed a perceived bias
on the paper’s opinion pages, calling a column racist.
Yet columns on the opinion pages are meant to be opinionated.
Student government officers had a problem with the opinion section,
not news articles, and Editor-in-Chief Kaitlin Pike said there is
an open invitation for any member of the community to submit a
letter in response to opinions in the Nexus with which they
disagree.
Pike said there has been only one response to the allegedly
racist opinion piece, which begs the question: If students are so
concerned about the writing on the opinion page, why are they not
responding with letters of their own?
It seems student government officers are willing to publicly
criticize the paper for publishing opinions with which they
disagree, but are not willing to take the time to respond.
Councilmembers also discussed writing their own regular column
in the paper that could be their mouthpiece. This would be a
terrible breach of independence for the paper and would be useless
horn-tooting on top of that.
The bottom line is that UCSB’s student government is
overstepping its bounds, not only hurting those at The Nexus but
the university’s student body as a whole.
A free press is vital to any campus community, and UCSB’s
council is hurting its own students in the name of a boycott meant
to help them.
Last year, the Daily Bruin’s financial situation forced it
to consider pursuing a referendum that would have provided funding
from student fees. The situation in Santa Barbara illustrates
exactly why this editorial board is glad The Bruin did not go
through with that proposal.
Giving an outside organization ““ especially the student
government we have to cover constantly ““ monetary leverage
over our publication is a terrible risk. If it could happen to
them, it could happen to us. We hope to avoid that at all costs,
and we hope the UCSB student government will come to its
senses.