maleficent

Raunchy Rutgers Newspaper Causes Campus Turmoil
By PATRICIA ALEX
STAFF WRITER



The Medium, a student-run weekly newspaper at Rutgers University, includes the kind of content that used to be shrouded in brown paper wrappers.

In the past two weeks alone, the paper has featured a comic strip depicting a man slapping a woman in the face during sex, an anonymous editorial calling all Rutgers women bitches, computer-created photos of President Bush and Osama bin Laden having sex and personals with homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic references.

All of it - including the obscenity and the hateful speech - is protected under the First Amendment, university officials say. And here at the public university, The Medium has another court-protected advantage that allows it to stay in business: It's funded by activity fees that students are required to pay.

The Medium will get about $22,000 in student funds this school year, allocated by the student government associations at the university's Livingston and Rutgers colleges. The public funding allows it to distribute 6,000 copies each week among the five Rutgers campuses in New Brunswick/Piscataway.

Some students are fed up.

"It subjugates women right, left and center," said Kim Brynildsen, a freshman at Rutgers' women's college, Douglass. Brynildsen, who is from Parsippany, and some of the other students at Douglass have launched a petition drive to get The Medium off campus. The initiative, she said, grew out of a women's studies class assignment to "construct a feminist action project."

And the students surely are getting a lesson. The Douglass group rallied on campus last week and was approached by editors of The Medium.

"They started counterdemonstrating," Brynildsen said. "They were being very hostile and not listening to what we were trying to say."

The editor of The Medium, Michael Stanley, said he and other staffers went to the rally merely to "have a dialogue" with the protesters. "We tried to explain to the people that we're not there to degrade women," he said.

This week's issue of The Medium responded to the protesters with a cover of topless women headlined "Douglass Protest Gone Wild."

Last week, 5,000 issues of the Medium disappeared. An anonymous group, whose members call themselves "The Progressive Activists," took responsibility. "If you're going to be progressive, don't steal our papers," Stanley said.

The Medium bills itself as "the Entertainment Weekly" of the Rutgers campus. Founded in 1970 as the campus newspaper of Livingston, The Medium says it provides "a special brand of light-hearted humor" to students. Many of the submissions are anonymous. It is delivered every Wednesday to student centers, dining halls and academic buildings.

"We are an envelope-pushing paper," said Stanley, the editor, a senior from Scotch Plains. "From speaking with students, I've realized we're an integral part of Wednesdays on campus."

This isn't the first time that the paper has been at the locus of controversy.

Last year, there were more student protests over the profane personals, which routinely slur many groups. This spring, editors apologized for publishing a cover-page cartoon that mocked the Holocaust. It featured a man throwing a ball at another who sat atop an oven. The text read: "Knock a Jew in the oven!" Editors said the drawing was not intended to be anti-Semitic but was "meant to amuse through extraordinary absurdity."

The cartoon sparked outrage from many students, school officials and outside groups. Nonetheless, Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick, in a letter to the university community, said not much could be done.

"It's understandable that many students want to shut down the paper because of its content," McCormick wrote. "To do so would clearly break the law."

The nation's courts have allowed wide latitude for speech on college campuses. Language that incites (there is a suggestion in The Medium this week that those who stole the papers be "hanged" in the middle of campus) likely doesn't cross the legal standard of "fighting words," some experts say.

Obscenity is mitigated by whether the material has redeeming artistic, social or political value. The Medium purports to be political and cultural satire, which is protected, legal experts say.

"There is a pretty strong threshold for obscenity," with all but hard-core pornography being exempt from protection, said David Hudson of the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Similarly, a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2000 found that universities could not withhold student-fee funding from registered student groups.

In a unanimous ruling involving a case at the University of Wisconsin, the Supreme Court said that student funds can go to diverse groups, even over the objections of individual students who disagree with some of the groups they are funding. A majority of the justices said that a student-fee program is constitutional as long as it is applied with "viewpoint neutrality," meaning that the views of any registered student group, no matter how objectionable, can't be used to deny funding.

That protection can be tough to swallow. "We've gotten a lot of complaints from those who feel their student funds should not go to the publication," said Gus Sara, president of the student government association at Rutgers' Livingston College.

Efforts to rescind that funding last year were met by threats of a lawsuit and warnings from university attorneys that the case could not be won, Sara said.

The process has been aggravating and frustrating, but ultimately a learning experience, Sara said.

And that's part of the point, say administrators at Rutgers.

"The purpose of student activity fees is to create a marketplace of different and diverse student viewpoints," said Brian Rose, vice president of student affairs. "And the expectation is that we do it a viewpoint-neutral way.

"Over several years, there have been different articles, cartoons and editorials [in The Medium] that have created various controversies on campus," Rose said. "What we have generally tried to do is facilitate dialogue between the students and the people responsible for content. The hope is that people learn from these experiences."

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I'm too lazy to google to find the actual content of the paper, and papers have disappeared en masse from the university, however, the question up for discussion:

Do you agree with the Supreme Court, should university funding go to create something that students and faculty find quite objectionable. If you were a student at Rutgers, or your own university, and part of your tuition went to fund this newspaper, woudl you object?

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