If a corporation – or a university – owns a newspaper or a newsletter in which students are invited to write, nothing in law inhibits the exercise of complete control over what is published. In a corporate context, such total control makes a great deal of sense. Corporate reputation and brand image are important issues that reasonably take precedence over personal expression.
If a corporation – or a university – owns a newspaper or a newsletter in which students are invited to write, nothing in law inhibits the exercise of complete control over what is published. In a corporate context, such total control makes a great deal of sense. Corporate reputation and brand image are important issues that reasonably take precedence over personal expression.
However, to be fair, it makes sense to publish clear guidelines, to the degree possible, governing the nature of acceptable writing or postings. Employees responsible for creating and publishing corporate content must know what to aim for and what to avoid to the best of their ability; and it makes sense to have the drafts reviewed by the marketing and legal departments before they go to press and to the Web.
Regulating content in private forums
The situation is not so clear in a college newspaper. A major purpose of such publications is to offer students opportunities to express their interest in journalism, to exercise their creativity and imagination, and to use their enthusiasm. Strong, well-written opinions should be welcome, even if they attack university policies or specific actions by named individuals. But in my opinion, encouraging or even allowing students to publish sloppy research and poorly written work does not contribute positively to their growth. Writing articles that are more appropriate for a supermarket tabloid (“Hillary Clinton Adopts Alien Baby;” “Dick Cheney is a Robot!”) than for a serious publication – and having them published on the Web for the world to read – is a pretty brutal growth experience: the writer and the quoted students will be suffering the consequences of their unflattering self-portrayals for years when potential employers search for information about them on the Web.
If students feel strongly that a university administration is clamping down too strongly on their ability to speak freely, they can always organize an independent outlet for their thoughts. For example, at my doctoral alma mater, Dartmouth College, the college publishes several newsletters under the control of the institution. However, students dissatisfied with college control formed an independent newspaper, The Dartmouth Review, in which to express their opinions without interference from faculty and administrators. The publication lists several similar independent student publications at Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, and College of William and Mary.
Creating a Web site is no longer an expensive proposition; for example, InMotion Hosting has provided excellent service for my personal Web site for about $7 a month, including registering my domain name. The only issue students might have to watch out for is that university names and logos are protected intellectual property, so no one can just stick them on unofficial Web pages or newspapers without permission.
But returning to the content and style of publications, all organizations offering a venue for the expression of opinion should ensure that opinions are clearly demarcated from supposedly factual reporting. Both can be justified, but muddling the two categories can lead to unfortunate results. For example, interviewing three close buddies and then making wild generalizations about an entire student body is a classic example of what not to do with non-random sample data.
And that’s my opinion!
In my next column, I’ll discuss the perils of unfettered – that is, thoughtless – speech on the Web.
