Recalcitrant administrators, emails and phone calls that go unreturned, and complaints from the people they write about — student journalists have a hard time, just as journalists do everywhere.
What happened to Brown University student Alex Shieh, though, went well beyond that. According to Jeremy W. Peters of The New York Times, Shieh was investigated to determine whether he had violated the school’s code of conduct. Shieh’s offense was committing journalism by sending an email to 3,805 administrators in March and asking them, DOGE-like, “what tasks you performed in the past week.”
As Dominic Coletti wrote for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which took up Shieh’s cause, Shieh was accused of misrepresenting himself by claiming that he was a reporter for The Brown Spectator, a conservative student publication — except that he was telling the truth. (The Spectator had gone on hiatus but was revived recently, so it’s possible that particular accusation was technically accurate. Not that it matters. You don’t need a news outlet to exercise your First Amendment rights.)
Two other students were also investigated. Though the Times reports that all three were cleared, the university administration has earned a New England Muzzle Award for its censorious approach to journalists who ask tough questions. After all, none of those administrators who were emailed had to respond, and reportedly many of them didn’t. FIRE’s Coletti writes:
Brown’s response here flies in the face of its due process and free expression guarantees, and threatens to chill student reporting on campus. Due process is essential not just to guarantee defendants a fair shake, but to uphold the legitimacy of campus disciplinary proceedings. It also acts as a bulwark protecting students’ individual liberties.
By the way, Shieh is an occasional contributor to The Boston Globe, and Globe columnist Carine Hajjar reported on his plight several weeks ago. She noted that one of Shieh’s fellow students at the Spectator criticized him because he “sorted scores of administrators, by name, into pejorative categories … all before having conducted a single interview.”
That’s pretty poor journalistic practice. It’s also protected by the First Amendment, especially at an independent publication like the Spectator, which has no ties to the university. Indeed, the administration is trying to force the paper to drop “Brown” from its name.
“Instead of chilling dissenting takes inside its community, Brown should be keener than ever to cultivate them,” Hajjar wrote. “Otherwise it’s asking for the Trump administration to swoop in with instructions.”
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Curious about your view of what constitutes journalism in light of the intentionally misleading email. To me, the gesture seems more like an expression of activism than journalism. I get that it’s not a great look for a campus to clamp down on activism either. At the same time, elite colleges seem to be owning that the inability to constrain certain forms of activism has resulted in some serious chaos, such as the capitol hill debacle, rash of presidential firings. Is your framing leaving out some of these complicating details?