The Captain’s Log and CNU

UPDATED AUG. 14, 2012

In general, I think a college or university administration needs to provide for student journalism in its budget, within reason, with the goal of providing real-world exposure to newspapering and online work. And that administration needs to stand aside and let the paper act as a real, independent newspaper. Academia is supposed to be about allowing ideas to collide freely, with some of them breaking to pieces and getting swept away. But students and professors perpetually have to fight for the right to make that happen, because so much of the inside world of academia is about enabling entropy.

— Anonymous

The 2011-2012 academic year opened and closed with a lot of turmoil at my college newspaper, The Captain’s Log at Christopher Newport University. Over the summer of 2011, there was an attempt to eliminate the print edition and the mechanisms were set in place to all but kill the journalism program. April 2012 saw the university hiding copies of the student newspaper to suppress an article.

The general outrage is partially because there has been a general feeling that the campus administration would love to see the student newspaper gone. These issues are not new. Many of the problems the staff had this year are variations of things that went on in the early 2000s when I was at my copy desk in the old Student Center. The newspaper thefts go back before that.

I’m taking it upon myself to try to gather links to what happened and my comments about them and put it all in one place. I hope this doesn’t become updated on a yearly basis. Some of the Daily Press links may be behind a pay fence.

If I missed a link, let me know here or at elliott [dot] robinson [at] exit265c [dot] com.