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A lesson is taught on press freedom

3 min read
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There are those news stories that occasionally come along where you go, “What?? That really can’t be true!”

Last week, one of them came out of Maryland, and, boy, is it a humdinger: Two members of the faculty at Mount St. Mary’s University, a small, private Catholic school in Emmitsburg, Md., have been given their walking papers for the offense of apparently not toeing the institutional line. One of them was the adviser of the campus newspaper, which recently published a story that was less than flattering to the university’s new president.

Ed Egan, who taught law at Mount St. Mary’s University and was an alumni and former trustee, was told his services were no longer required after the campus newspaper, the Mountain Echo, published a story about plans by university administrators to “cull” struggling freshmen from the student body so the school could boost its retention numbers and, at the same time, lift its standing in various “best colleges and universities” rankings. Some faculty protested, suggesting that trying to boot out freshmen who hadn’t yet gotten their footing was overhasty and, perhaps, a bit cruel. However, Simon Newman, the school’s president, dismissed these concerns, saying there would be some “collateral damage.” But what really made the outrage meter spike was an article in the Mountain Echo in which a faculty member reported Newman remarked in a conversation to him that the proposed cull “is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies … put a Glock to their heads.”

The chairman of the university’s board of trustees, John Coyne, shrugged off Newman’s musings as an “unfortunate metaphor,” and Egan was fired for contravening the school’s code of conduct. Egan is convinced he was axed because the president’s comments saw the light of day. This view was unwittingly confirmed by Coyne, who told The New York Times that Egan was fired, more or less, because there was insufficient positive spin in the story.

“Ed, as the faculty adviser, could really frame the battlefield, if you will, around what the issue was,” Coyne said. “We had a president in a private conversation with a colleague (and) says the bad-metaphor-hall-of-fame statement, and that was the story. And the position behind it about a retention program that was never enacted, was suddenly lost in the conversation.”

Translation: Coyne and the administration believed the campus newspaper should have been part of the university’s public relations division. Egan, and the students who reported the story, believed the job of the newspaper was to offer an honest take on what is happening on campus. Egan should have been commended, not canned.

We can only hope that some other university will snap Egan up. But, more urgently, we hope the students at Mount St. Mary University don’t learn the wrong lesson from this, and decide that a free press and straightforward reporting of the news entails too many risks and they should sweep unflattering realities under the rug. Instead, they should learn that those who wield power in any setting can be subject to flaws and foibles, say things that are dumb and make decisions that are inept. The press – even if it’s a campus newspaper – can and must serve as a check on that power.

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