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The editors of the Indiana Daily Student received a jarring email Tuesday evening: Indiana University was canceling all scheduled and future print editions of the newspaper, starting right away with the homecoming issue set to hit campus newsstands two days later.
The “shift from print to digital,” Dean of the Media School David Tolchinsky wrote, had always been part of a plan to “align IU with industry trends” and address the student newspaper’s “structural deficit (subsidized by the campus) that has exceeded several hundred thousand dollars annually.”
But the paper’s editors say the abrupt move was really about keeping them from putting out news about the university community. “The university was trying to tell us what we could and could not print in our paper,” said Andrew Miller, the student paper’s co-editor in chief.
The print ban, which followed weeks of tension over the control and format of the 158-year-old student newspaper, has set off a dustup over press freedom and drawn criticism of the university from national speech watchdog groups and high-profile donor and IU alumnus Mark Cuban.
On Thursday, the front page of the Daily Student, which ran online only, was topped with huge letters in red: “CENSORED.”
The Indiana University student media charter “re-affirms the independence and freedom” of student media and says “final content decisions and responsibility rest with duly appointed student editors and managers.” But at student newspapers – as in some professional newsrooms – editorial independence can sometimes be more of a shifting battleground than an immutable reality. According to a 2022 survey by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, at least 60 percent of college newspaper editors reported experiencing at least one instance of administrative censorship in the previous year.
The IDS editors said they knew trouble was in the offing when James Rodenbush, the director of student media, was fired Tuesday for his “lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the University’s direction,” according to a copy of his termination letter signed by Tolchinsky.
The university declined to make administrators available for interviews. In a statement Wednesday, Chancellor David Reingold said the decision to end print versions of the ISD aims to address the newspaper’s deficit of “hundreds of thousands of dollars each year” and that the move “concerns the medium of distribution, not editorial content.”
Miller, 21, rejects the university’s framing of its recent moves as a business decision, pointing to the thousands of dollars of lost advertising revenue for the homecoming issue.
Cuban, the billionaire businessman, also expressed skepticism about the university citing finances, saying he had donated $500,000 to the school newspaper over the past five years – including, he told the Indianapolis Star, $250,000 to IU’s general fund over the summer earmarked for the student newspaper.
“Not happy. Censorship isn’t the way,” Cuban wrote on X. “I’m happy to help because the IDS is important to kids at IU.”
The conflict erupted this week but was long in the making. Changes to the student newspaper were announced last fall when the university took over its debt. As part of that move, the university laid out a plan for reducing the paper’s print schedule from weekly to seven “special editions” a semester, beginning in spring 2025 semester. This week’s developments underscore an evident misunderstanding about exactly what these special editions would look like and what kind of news they would include, but seven print editions were published in the spring as regular newspapers with themed special edition inserts inside.
Regular coverage proceeded in both the paper’s print and online editions. Along with stories about IU sports teams and campus events, reporters covered the dismissal of an IU professor that raised questions about whether the university had followed due process. It wrote about the university storing sensitive documents and donor information on an unsecured server. In September, the newspaper wrote about the university not releasing the results of a review that the board of trustees said exonerated IU President Pamela Whitten of allegations of plagiarism in her 1996 doctoral dissertation.
Rodenbush, who had been the student media adviser since 2018, said administrators asked in a series of meetings in September why the newspaper was being printed with regular news on the front. He said the university wanted the content of the student newspaper centered closely on the themes of the special editions.
Rodenbush said he communicated the administrators’ expectations to the student editors, who continued working on the Sept. 25 edition that featured front page headlines about a report showing a decrease in area homelessness and an upcoming campus visit from Tucker Carlson.
“I knew that it was going to look like a newspaper and that it was going to be a point of contention,” Rodenbush said. “But it’s not my job to dictate what the student newspaper looks like.”
The other co-editor of the Daily Student, Mia Hilkowitz, also 21, said the university’s directions infringed on the paper’s editorial independence, raising the question of which news stories do or do not hew to the themes of the special editions, like homecoming.
“I would consider the news that the university tried to censor the newspaper to be homecoming news,” she said.
Free speech groups including PEN America, the Student Press Law Center, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression condemned the university’s decision. Kristen Shahverdian, program director of PEN America’s Campus Free Speech Program, called the move a “direct attack on the independence of student journalism and a blatant violation of the principles of free expression that public universities are bound to uphold.”
Citing Indiana legislation aimed at regulating what can be taught and discussed at public schools, Shahverdian said the university’s action on the student newspaper should be read as “part of a troubling pattern in which universities and lawmakers in the state are wielding administrative power and politicized laws to silence voices.”
In a “letter from the editors” published online this week, Hilkowitz and Miller accused the university of breaching the paper’s editorial independence, writing, “We will continue to resist as long as the university disregards the law.”
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