The Guidon, the Norwich University student newspaper. Screenshot on Thursday, October 10. Photo by Glenn Russell/VTDigger
The president of Norwich University said Monday that the university would allow its suspended student newspaper, The Guidon, to resume publishing but still with an unspecified level of oversight.
It’s not clear when exactly the paper, which has been barred from publishing since the summer, will be able to resume its reporting. Norwich president John Broadmeadow, a retired lieutenant general, wrote in a Monday morning letter to the university community that the paper should resume its work “as soon as practical.”
Broadmeadow also instructed that “a code of ethics grounded in widely established journalism norms be drafted for my approval,” he wrote in the letter. “We will also document a method of ethics oversight by The Guidon’s academic advisors.”
The letter comes four days after VTDigger reported on the suspension of the paper at the Northfield military university.
Norwich administrators have said that the goal of the suspension was to ensure that the paper’s journalists were sufficiently prepared to responsibly report on campus. But that decision has angered some professors and students, who have accused administrators of censoring the paper after it published multiple articles critical of the university.
The suspension dates back to June, when a Norwich administrator wrote to Shane Graber, the newspaper’s faculty advisor, and told him that the paper could not resume publishing until he submitted certain documentation for approval: training materials, a code of ethics, a handbook and “Student Media Bylaws” for the newspaper.
In that letter, Ted Kohn, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, raised criticism about Graber’s performance as The Guidon’s advisor and concerns about some of its stories and student journalists.
READ MORE
Students, faculty and administrators had expressed concern about “the conduct of Guidon reporters in relation to a Title IX investigation,” according to the letter, an apparent reference to a Guidon story published this spring about a reported sexual assault on campus.
Graber declined to comment Monday. Last week, he challenged criticisms of his performance and said that he had in fact submitted the requested documentation — but the paper remained suspended.
“If they had a problem with my mentorship — I’m not conceding that at all — but if they did, then that’s a personnel issue,” Graber told VTDigger last week. “You don’t censor a student news organization for that.”
Prior to the publication of VTDigger’s article, Norwich had been engaged in an internal discussion about The Guidon and its ethical standards, Broadmeadow said in his letter Monday.
VTDigger’s story was published before that discussion concluded and triggered a surge of what Broadmeadow called “misinformation and underinformed criticism” in his letter.
“To avoid further public rancor and unwarranted criticism against Norwich, I have ended the debate by requesting the Provost reinstate the Guidon’s publication as soon as practical,” he wrote.
Aira Yzabel Manampan, who was The Guidon’s editor in chief from January 2023 until her graduation this spring, said that she was “a bit” relieved at the president’s message, and that she was happy that the paper’s supporters had been heard.
But “honestly, I am and was pissed,” Manampan said in a text message. During her two-year stint as the editor in chief, she learned that Norwich’s administration was “finicky” about what the paper published and had once asked for a story to be retracted, she said.
The oversight mentioned in Broadmeadow’s letter was “odd,” Manampan said, adding, “I thought we were an independent news organization.”
A spokesperson for Norwich said Monday that the president and provost would not be available for interviews and did not respond to emailed questions. It’s not yet clear what oversight of the newspaper might look like once it resumes publishing.
At other institutions of higher education in Vermont — the University of Vermont, Middlebury College, Bennington College and Vermont State University — student publications are free from administrative influence, according to students and spokespeople there.
Dominic Coletti, the program officer for campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech nonprofit, said the imposition of any sort of administrative oversight, including an ethics policy, raised red flags.
“As a general matter, of course, FIRE, and I personally, am very concerned anytime an administration tries to exercise control over an independent newspaper,” Coletti said. “That editorial independence extends to things like ethics, that editorial independence extends to coverage decisions.”
Coletti said that university administrators don’t generally take much of an interest in student newspapers unless they have problems with their coverage.
“Administrators don’t, by and large, start meddling with the operations of student newspapers until there is content that they find objectionable,” he said. “And the mere fact of that, to me, makes this case look pretty egregious.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Norwich University student newspaper should resume publishing, but with ‘ethics oversight,’ president says.