Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Faculty senate imposes gag order, prior restraint of the press 

In its infinite infallibility to instinctively inch towards insanity, our faculty senate passed two weeks ago this motion determined to not let this Homecoming Queen story and the Bolshevik attack on the St. Cloud Times die:

Motion for hte Faculty Senate to join with the SCSU Student Association in deploring the racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and transphobic postings on the message boards of the St. Cloud Times, finds anonymous postings to be inconsistent with accepted journalistic standards, and calls on the St. Cloud Times to require all posters to identify themselves by real name and city.

In the event the St. Cloud Times declines to require accurate indentities of posters within thirty days, the Faculty Senate calls on the Administration to forbid sales of the St. Cloud Times on campus and recommends that the SCSU faculty not grant interviews to St. Cloud Times Reporters until such time as the anonymous postings are ended.


The St. Cloud Times then would be not only barred from distribution from campus, but the faculty union would hinder the outreach efforts of the university in improving our presence in the community. The Times has run an article about this and an editorial (Jan. 23, appears no longer to be online.) The faculty union has also circulated a letter from the Times' publisher Bill Albrecht (it appears to have been written after the visit in November) in which he not only says they will continue with Story Chat but also says their antics are a waste of time.
As for the time we spent together, I wish it would have been more productive, because in the end, it was not a meeting, discussion or productive. From the opening phone call, the purpose of the meeting was unclear and the context was misrepresented.

It's not a meeting, Bill: It's guerilla theater.
I would also encourage all who represented Support the Court to regularly review the St. Cloud Times ... and participate in the dialogue on Story Chat. I encourage this based on some of the assumptions and statements that were made about our people and product by individuals who admittedly do not read the product or have never participated in the chat.

In other words, you were attacked by people who don't know what they are talking about. Doesn't that sound just like an academic leftist? Gin up a bit of campus theater by running a man for homecoming queen, collect reactions of some people who think queens are of a particular sex, and then use it as a means of suppressing free speech, without any regard for the people they attack?

Somewhere Lenin smiles.

The Times' letter will be read at the Faculty Senate meeting today. I have better things to do listening to a job candidate present his research, but we'll stay on this story.

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