In a state where it’s okay for dead people to vote, it probably makes sense that invisible people can take up space at college trustee meetings.

That might explain how the editor-in-chief of The Courier, the student newspaper at the College of DuPage, was turned away from a quote-unquote “full” meeting room — with visibly empty seats in it.

Editor Nick Davison has asked Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office to investigate why he and other would-be attendees were turned away from the March 15 meeting of the College of DuPage Board of Trustees when campus security threw up the “no vacancy” sign.

Davison has multiple witnesses who can attest that Room 2200 of the Student Services Center — maximum posted occupancy, 244 — still had empty seats when he was shunted off to an “overflow room” where he and disappointed faculty members were able to (somewhat) hear piped-in audio from the meeting.

Davison alleges that closing the meeting prematurely was a violation of the Illinois Open Meetings Act, since — although the meeting was open to some of the public — it was closed without legal justification to others. (The college insists that the decision was solely based on the occupancy of the room, with no ulterior motives.)

A new federal court ruling, ACLU v. Alvarez, opens up an interesting additional possibility for challenge.

In that case, the federal Seventh Circuit (which covers Illinois) decided Tuesday that there is a constitutionally protected right to gather news in public places, at least where police activity is concerned.

"Aw man, I knew I shoulda set the alarm for those DuPage trustee tickets. Eh, let's see if there's anything left for Phish." (Photo by Andy F., used under Creative Commons license)

It probably is just a coincidence that, just last summer, this same college abruptly removed a 16-year-veteran journalism adviser beloved by her students and replaced her with a one-day-a-week adjunct instructor.

And it probably is just a coincidence that this meeting featured an especially contentious (and newsworthy) series of presentations from irate faculty members who’ve been working without a contract since July.

And it probably is just a coincidence that, according to Davison, journalists from The Courier are stopped at the door of trustee meetings and ordered to identify themselves and produce photo I.D., while other visitors are waved through.

Because in Illinois, they don’t have corruption. They just have lots and lots of coincidences.

Dave Copeland is a published author, an accomplished professional journalist, and a creative teacher who incorporates new-media skills into his exams.

Dave Copeland

He’s the journalism adviser that most college students wish they had.

The incoming editor-in-chief at his campus newspaper calls him “irreplaceable.”

So naturally, his employer wants to get rid of him.

SPJ President John Ensslin

On Monday, the Society of Professional Journalists weighed in with a letter to Bridgewater State University, expressing concern over the college’s apparent intent to remove Copeland as adviser to BSU’s student newspaper.

(“Apparent intent,” because the college’s only public statement has been to announce that Copeland gave notice he was resigning. Which was kind of a surprise to Copeland.)

The type of watchdog journalism 4 out of 5 college administrators prefer. (Photo by Don Bergquist, used under Creative Commons license.)

Copeland has been advising The Comment for just a year. Under his coaching, the formerly sleepy newspaper has stirred awake — not always to the liking of those in power.

The back-story of how Copeland joined the walking dead is spelled out here — but the thumbnail of it is this:

BSU’s president, Dr. Dana Mohler-Faria, blew up at Copeland and his editor-in-chief in an April 25 meeting over two articles. One — questioning the need to raise student fees when college employment rolls were declining — was unassailable, the kind of watchdog reporting that student publications should be doing.

The second was, admittedly, a tough judgment call. The newspaper covered a rape awareness rally at which a student — identifying herself publicly by name — described her own rape while attending another college. The Comment elected to publish the name, despite an outcry from angry readers who believed the story placed the student in danger of retaliation.

In his letter, the SPJ’s John Ensslin said even a mistake in editorial judgment shouldn’t be grounds for canning the adviser:

While I would not have made the same decision the student made, I’m mindful that these are student journalists who are learning the hard way about the consequences of the choices they make.

Copeland is now the Schrodinger’s Cat of journalism advisers, neither verifiably alive nor dead. He should know his fate by August — that’s when contracts for the fall semester typically are issued (he is, of course, a non-tenured adjunct on a year-to-year lease). But the Bridgewater administration shouldn’t let him and The Comment dangle until then.

As the SPLC said in an April 26 letter to President Mohler-Faria:

This provides a leadership opportunity for you and your administration – rather than taking destructive action that will set back journalism and the students you are preparing for careers – to bring about a campus-wide dialogue about sensitive issues such as the portrayal of sexual assault in the media.

(As a clinic in how to turn a First Amendment controversy into a constructive discussion that improves conditions on campus, look at how The Eagle at American University handled the backlash over a vile 2010 column that made light of date rape. With student editors taking a lead role, the campus organized public forums where everyone was forced to confront the enormity of the date-rape problem.)

Next to the fire extinguisher and the poison-control hotline number and the defibrillator paddles, every college adviser needs a copy of this…

In case of emergency...

It’s Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer’s groundbreaking March 13 ruling in Moore v. Watson, a case that exemplifies the principle that — to win a First Amendment claim against a school or college — you need an opponent that is the perfect combination of stubborn and stupid.

It’s worth reading the opinion in its entirety to appreciate the gauntlet of harassment and retaliation that editor-in-chief George Providence III and adviser Gerian Steven Moore endured at The Tempo. But the basic outline will be eerily familiar to advisers at image-obsessed colleges everywhere…

(1) Newspaper publishes truthful-but-embarrassing stories about the school. (In this case, the arrest of the school’s basketball coach, glitches in the distribution of athletic scholarships, and more.)

(2) College PR director tries to assert mandatory pre-publication review of the paper — for (wait for it…) “spelling mistakes.”

(3) Newspaper publishes more truthful-but-embarrassing stories. (In this case, wondering aloud how a student organization with $1,500 to its name could have spent $22,000 putting on a fashion show.)

(4) Enraged college PR director declares that the student editor “needs to be stopped.” And the next day…

(5) Enraged college PR director fires faculty adviser.

That, Judge Pallmeyer concluded, was a violation of adviser Moore’s First Amendment rights (and, it appears from the opinion, also a violation of then-student editor Providence’s rights as well). Which is huge.

Judge: CSU's justifications for getting rid of adviser are "suspect"

Federal courts haven’t always been hospitable to such claims. Since the adviser isn’t “the speaker” — and, unlike his students, is a government employee — some courts have hesitated to recognize even a nakedly retaliatory firing as a constitutional offense.

Illinois admittedly is an unusual case, because its legislature extended extra-strength legal protection to the student media in the College Campus Press Act of 2008. Only two other states, California and Oregon, have such express statutory protections at the college level.

The Illinois act gives advisers the right to challenge retaliatory personnel actions or the imposition of prior review. Judge Pallmeyer said that statutory recognition makes advisers “participants” in the publication, not just bystanders.

But importantly, Judge Pallmeyer’s ruling relied primarily on the Constitution, not state law. While she did look to the Act as evidence that student publications in Illinois operate under a “public forum” model — which confers heightened First Amendment protection — her reasoning can apply by analogy to just about all college student newspapers at public institutions, since all good ones are set up as “forums” (meaning no mandatory pre-approval of content by a college employee).

Under the court’s order, Moore will be reinstated to a comparable job with Chicago State and must be retained for at least a year, and his record will be cleansed of any reference to his October 2008 departure as a “firing.”

Remember the part about stubborn and stupid?

Here is how Chicago State greeted Judge Pallmeyer’s findings: With a victory dance. If they could’ve spiked the court’s opinion in the end zone, they would have.

This is a win for the university.

–General Counsel Patrick Cage. Whose side totally didn’t win.

This isn’t lipstick on a pig. It’s breast implants, hair extensions, press-on nails, three pair of extra-strength Spanx and a bottle of Chanel’s finest.

Not enough lipstick in Illinois to make this ruling kissable for CSU

If you read Chicago State’s press release with an English accent (and really, doesn’t that make every press release more bearable?) you can hear General Counsel Cage waving his severed stumps protesting, “It’s just a flesh wound.”

CSU’s “logic” goes like this: Because the student and adviser didn’t get every remedy they asked for, that means they lost.

But the reason Providence didn’t qualify for any relief is simply that he had left Chicago State willingly. As a practical matter, there was nothing the court could do for him. It does not mean that CSU didn’t violate his rights — in fact, Judge Pallmeyer expressly found a series of violations, including (a) imposing a retaliatory regime of prior review and (b) selectively enforcing a “protocol” requiring the university P.R. director to pre-approve all interviews.

When “duh — winning” is a school’s reaction to being found responsible for intentionally violating the First Amendment, you know what’s coming next: More of the same.

Sure enough, not four weeks after defiantly insisting it “won” the Moore case, the college was racking up more “victories” with an unconstitutional gag order requiring all employees to vet anything they say or write about the university — even on social media — with CSU’s public relations office.

Which makes total sense, because the people in the CSU public relations office are such geniuses at getting the school national media attention.

That lasted all of about 24 hours, until somebody at Chicago State dug their copy of the Constitution out from the “shred” basket.

(Aside: If employees telling the truth about your college makes it look bad, you can try to stop them from talking, but it might also work to not actually run the college badly. I don’t know, just a thought.)

The Stubborn Stupids would make an excellent college mascot.

When college media advisers get fired and replaced with … nobody — and it’s been known to happen — it’s the students who suffer most.

Frank Barrows

So it looks encouraging that Eastern Carolina University announced today that a highly credentialed veteran of The Charlotte Observer is taking over as interim adviser to The East Carolinian.

According to his LinkedIn bio, Frank Barrows is a 36-year veteran of the Observer who spent 13 years as managing editor before leaving in 2005, accumulating a trophy case full of reporting awards. He is a past president and co-founder of the North Carolina Coalition on Open Government. He’s even the president of his local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, an organization that strongly advocates against the censorship of student publications.

We say “looks” encouraging, because hiring an excellently qualified adviser is only the beginning. The university must also establish clear boundaries so that it is unmistakable that the adviser is not being asked to overstep the student editors’ discretionary editorial judgments.

When an adviser sees that the last occupant of the job left feet-first after being chastised for insufficiently censoring the paper, the temptation to overreach will be hard to resist. It’s fortunate that, in Frank Barrows, ECU appears to have chosen someone who neither needs the job nor is a stranger to pressure.

Sigh.

You expect to have to teach remedial First Amendment lessons to small children. Or especially stubborn high school principals.

You don’t expect that journalists — people who, but for the Bill of Rights, would be writing nothing more controversial than “large fries” — will not only completely misunderstand the First Amendment, but vehemently insist that the First Amendment is more limited than 150 years of judicial rulings say it is.

But, sigh, it happens. More than you’d believe.

"Please, not another member of the 'Journalists Against the First Amendment' club..." (Photo by Kevin Boey from Flickr, used under Creative Commons license.)

On Jan. 22, The Reflector, the newspaper serving Greenville, N.C., decided to publish a misinformed rant by one of the paper’s editors, Janet Storm, defending hometown East Carolina University’s decision to fire journalism adviser Paul Isom.

It’s fine to express a contrarian opinion about whether Isom was a good adviser. It is not fine to insist (as Storm did repeatedly) that there is no First Amendment right not to be punished by the government for what you say.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

–Daniel Patrick Moynihan (attributed)

In Storm’s view, it is a First Amendment violation only if the government succeeds in stopping you from speaking — not if the government imposes a “price” that punishes speech after-the-fact.

That, she maintained, is no different from the “price” any speaker expects to pay if he’s beaten up by a person he insults in a bar.

Um, well, yes. But actually, that’s illegal too.

We observe this affliction — “First Amendment blindness” — disproportionately in small newspapers where people are unhappy in their jobs. (“WE can get fired randomly for unfair reasons — why shouldn’t everybody?”)

To the credit of Reflector editors, they agreed to publish a brief rebuttal piece, which appeared in Friday’s paper. The entire letter is viewable here. It explains, in part:

A government edict that says ‘do not publish X’ and a government edict that says ‘if you publish X, you are fired’ have the same practical effect, and they are equally unconstitutional.

(Of course, to be clear, Paul Isom never “published” anything — he simply obeyed the law in refusing to block his students‘ publishing decision — a distinction lost on The Reflector.)

It’s not fair to expect journalists to be constitutional law scholars. But it is fair to expect them to avoid pretending that they are.

[Editor's note: This is the second story in a two-part series looking at the dismissal of East Carolina University Student Media Adviser Paul Isom]

Good journalism and good journalism education apparently are not the most popular commodities at East Carolina University.

Carlton Purvis, a former East Carolinian news editor, said in an interview Wednesday that the ECU administration hasn’t liked The East Carolinian‘s coverage for a while.

“We broke a story when I was there about the Chancellor,” said Purvis, voted College Journalist of the Year by the Southeast Journalism Conference for his work in 2009. “He hadn’t paid his [motor vehicle] property taxes in a while, so they put … a hold on his accounts and things like that.

“We reported on that, and I am sure the administration wasn’t happy about that.”

Purvis said the paper felt pushback, but that it never escalated like it did after the November publication of the streaker photos.

“They had a meeting with the administration,” he said. “I’ve never seen it go that far.

“I have had experience with this administration when they are unhappy about something. But I never expected or experienced them at that level.”

And Purvis is concerned that this action by ECU is affecting The Eastern Carolinian’s ability and resolve to report. Purvis’ post on the blog, Death and Taxes, was the first story to get any comment from the current TEC newspaper staff.

The type of journalism preferred by ECU administrators. Photo by Mark and Allegra Jaroski-Biava (Flickr), used under Creative Commons license.

“My impression is that they are going to proceed very cautiously,” he said. “I don’t think they have as an aggressive staff as we did when I was there. So I think something like this might be enough for them to say, ‘We’ll just color inside the lines so nothing else happens.’

“I don’t know that that is true, but I get the impression that they will be treading lightly for a little bit.”

But former TEC Sports Editor Jared Jackson said that attitude isn’t the way for the staff to go.

“If I make a mistake, then, hey, that is my learning experience,” he said.

And Jackson portrays an adviser that didn’t interfere, but was engaged.

“He would say, ‘It’s your decision, but here is what could happen if you do it and if you don’t do it this could happen.’”

Jackson called Isom a good adviser and mentor, and his reaction to Isom’s dismissal was not diplomatic.

“It was an insult to everything in journalism, in my opinion,” he said.

The university has invited Isom to waive confidentiality and open his personnel file. He has refused until those files are first made available to him, as is his statutory right under North Carolina law.

But students who have come through Isom’s program say he was good for them. And good for their careers.

“He was a great teacher,” Purvis said. “He gave us real-life examples.”

[Editor’s note: This is Part I in a series of posts about Paul Isom and his dismissal from East Carolina University. FACT spoke by phone with Isom Tuesday and has contacted former students to gain a better  picture of an ugly situation. In Part II, we will report reaction from students and advocacy groups.]

When it comes to his firing, Paul Isom isn’t just sitting around.

Isom, let go last week from his duties as East Carolina University’s Student Media Adviser, is putting on a full-frontal assault via traditional and social media. He is getting out his story.

Paul Isom remains on at ECU as an adjunct.

Isom and his supporters contend that he has been jettisoned because of photographs published by The East Carolinian of a streaker at a November football game. The university isn’t talking. And national organizations are mobilizing to support him.

(The latest: A letter today from the National Press Photographers Association.)

And Isom says part of the shame is that all of this need not have happened.

“If anyone had bothered to listen to me at any point in the process, this could have been avoided,” he said Tuesday.

Isom said he attempted “three or four times” to arrange a meeting with ECU’s top administrators to explain the role of the student press and the obligations and limitations or the adviser’s role. All attempts were, in essence, ignored.

Isom didn’t get that chance until early November — after The East Carolinian ran the full-frontal shots in a three-frame sequence on page one.

“The morning of Nov. 8 when the vice chancellor was calling me and was apoplectic, I was trying to explain to her the best that I could why I do what I do and that everything that I do is in the best interest of the university,” he said. “And I tried to explain why I don’t get involved [in editorial decisions], but that was obviously not the best time to have that conversation.”

Even if Isom had wanted to have that conversation, the vice chancellor, Virginia Hardy, stonewalled him.

“She stopped communicating with me about the story and the streaker photos,” he said.

Far from being someone out to make ECU look bad in the public eye, Isom said he was aware of the tightrope advisers walk between loyalty to their employers and respecting students’ First Amendment rights. He said he tried to strike the right balance.

“That (suggested) meeting was one way,” he said. “Another way was I tried to say to my supervisor or anyone who would listen, as politely as possible, was that everything I do is in the university’s best interest.

“The reason I advise the way I advise is to keep the university free from liability and to also maximize the students’ learning experience.”

And Isom stressed the point that he believes administrators have the hardest time grasping.

“I also explain what the students’ role is, which is not to be a PR arm of the university,” he said, “but to cover news objectively whether it be good, bad, or neutral.

“We are teaching them to be journalists. We want them to be as well prepared as possible so that when they graduate – if they choose to be journalists professionally – they will have the skills to go out and get those good jobs.”

And Isom says that in order to develop those skills, they have to make mistakes and feel free to do so.

“What I tried to tell the vice chancellor is that they are making decisions and they are learning from them,” he said. “They learn from every decision they make, even the very small ones.

“There is no doubt that they learned something in this instance, too.”

Isom says he will always “own up” to his mistakes as an adviser, but in the case of the streaker photos that isn’t necessary.

“I can’t think of a thing that I could have done differently or would have done differently,” he said. “I didn’t tell them what to do. I didn’t tell them to run it or not. I agreed it was an option – among many.

“I didn’t say ‘Don’t do anything to make the administrators mad.’ I don’t think that would have been doing my job. The only thing I could have done differently was (to tell them that) and then I wouldn’t be teaching them to be journalists.”

Hardy hasn’t been granting interview requests to explain her side of the story, but today ECU upped the ante by releasing a statement claiming to have exculpatory documents proving a non-First-Amendment-violative motive for the firing — if Isom will waive confidentiality and authorize their release. Isom is asking the University to first identify exactly what documents it claims to have — since he hasn’t seen them himself.

Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.

–Miles Davis

 First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.

–Mahatma Gandhi

On Tuesday, East Carolina University realized it could no longer say nothing about journalism adviser Paul Isom’s Jan. 4 canning.

So its vice chancellor, Dr. Virginia Hardy, released a statement.

That said nothing.

Here is what ECU could’ve said, but didn’t: “Paul Isom’s firing had absolutely nothing to do with his students’ decision to run a photo of a streaker on the front page.” 

It may or may not be legal for the university to reveal what is in Isom’s personnel files — more about that another day. But Isom’s personnel files do not contain the reasons he was NOT fired, unless they do some really screwy record-keeping at East Carolina. (“Also not fired for: pillow-fighting in the conference room with dwarves, playing Michael Bolton albums too loud, wearing unmatched socks on a Thursday, causing the Hindenburg to explode…”)

ECU’s profession of respect for students’ input — why, we even included them in our discussions “when it was constructive and useful for their education” — seemed somehow … oh, what’s the right word?

I hear comments sometimes that large oil companies are really companies that don’t care, but that is not the case in BP, we care about the small people.

–Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman, BP

That’s it. Oily.

I guess it’s possible — as ECU just has — to describe being chewed out and threatened by a person with life-or-death control over your program as an “open, informational discussion.”

Let’s hope that Dr. Hardy and Chancellor Steve Ballard have many open, informational discussions with their bosses on the Board of Trustees.

Soon.

Today’s forecast for Greenville, N.C.: Mostly cloudy, with a 100 percent chance of crap-storms.

When colleges sack their media advisers (note to self: “Sack-gate” would be an excellent name for this scandal), shutter their newspapers or otherwise commit First Amendment atrocities, they count on the wringer of bad publicity stopping after a day. Two, at the most.

That, as the kids say, is SO not happening at East Carolina University.

On Monday, the Student Press Law Center sent a letter of concern to East Carolina Chancellor Steve Ballard and Board of Trustees Chairman Robert V. Lucas calling for the Trustees to open an independent investigation into the Jan. 4 firing of student media adviser Paul Isom:

[I]t is incumbent on ECU to give the strongest assurance to the students who work in Student Media that the removal of Mr. Isom in no way signals an intent to discourage the wide-open debate on controversial issues that is uniquely at home on the campus of a university. They are owed at least that much. Independent journalism cannot flourish under the cloud of fear that Mr. Isom’s sudden and unexplained removal has created.

As the letter points out, the editor-in-chief of The East Carolinian, Caitlin Hale, was told that her paper’s decision to go full-frontal in a Nov. 8 photo of a football-field streaker would be met with (dumm-dumm-dumm, DAH-dah-dum, dah-dah-dum) “consequences.” Less than two months later, Isom was consequenced out of the adviser chair he’d occupied since 2008.

The college free-expression group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) separately weighed in, with a letter detailing how each Wile E. Coyote-like effort of a public university to outwit the First Amendment has ended with a Wile E. Coyote-like “splat.”

Worse for ECU, the college’s handling of Sackgate (there, now it’s a thing) doesn’t even have the support of its own community newspaper, The East Carolinian‘s competition.

In today’s editorial, The Daily Reflector first takes the student editors to task for a “salacious and inappropriate” picture that never should’ve seen print — but then says firing Isom was the wrong response:

[T]he decision seems distasteful and sends an unwelcome message about the university as a teaching environment tolerant of missteps.

This won’t be just a stormy day for East Carolina. It’ll be a stormy week, a stormy month …