08/14/06

AP Centerpiece: Newspaper settlement left unresolved issues

By ROXANA HEGEMAN
Associated Press Writer

WICHITA, Kan. (AP) -- Jeremy Clawson had just gotten off the phone in the fall of 2003 with a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who called the Barton County Community College's newspaper seeking background information on basketball player Ricky Clemons' coursework at the Great Bend college.

That call left Clawson -- at the time editor of the college paper, the Interrobang -- uneasy.

"I told our newspaper staff that if the Post-Dispatch is reporting on our school, we should be reporting on this story, too," Clawson would later testify in a deposition.

The unfolding story of academic and financial fraud of the college's athletic department culminated in the felony convictions of its athletic director and seven basketball and track coaches and lead to the firing of the college's president.

The scheme involved the fraudulent use of campus and federal work-study money to bypass a Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference rule prohibiting full scholarships at Kansas junior colleges. Coaches -- two of whom were sentenced Monday to probation in connection with the investigation -- believed that ban put the Kansas schools at a recruiting disadvantage.

Along the way, the scandal may also have taken a toll on the First Amendment press and speech freedoms of student journalists and their embattled faculty newspaper adviser, who struggled to cover on their own college campus a story that had become national news.

A civil rights lawsuit filed against the college's board of trustees by former newspaper adviser Jennifer Schartz was settled last week -- just days before trial was set to begin.

Schartz called the settlement for $130,000 a vindication of the principles for which she was fighting. But she did not get her job back under the deal.

The case had been closely followed by First Amendment advocates who point to a spate of firings in recent years of faculty media advisers over the content of their college publications.

Among them is Kathy Lawrence, former president and chair of the advocacy program for College Media Advisers, the trade group representing faculty media advisers. She called the Barton County deal a "fairly significant thing," but noted the out-of-court settlement did not reinstate the adviser and set no case law.

"In that sense it didn't gain a lot, but I think it demonstrated one thing: If you are going to do something to an adviser, you had better be prepared to pay more than $100,000 for that mistake. And that might be enough to make some schools think twice," she said. "At least I hope it would be."

In her lawsuit, Schartz alleged the college's decision to terminate her employment was in retaliation for her exercising her First Amendment rights as a faculty adviser, for supporting the First Amendment rights of her students and for her refusal to censor the content of the student newspaper in violation of the First Amendment.

Schartz lost her job after she refused to prohibit publication of letters to the editor that were critical of Barton County Community college staff. The school contended it had a right to set a "reasonable policy" for letters to the editor because the paper was an academic product published by the college.

Since her firing, the school has adopted a policy stating that the newspaper adviser cannot be held responsible for what a student newspaper does, Schartz said, adding that if that policy been in place when she was working for the college, she would not have lost her job.

Her attorney, Larry Schumaker, said that policy acknowledges students' freedom of the press, and that while not a part of the settlement, it was a welcome outcome from the lawsuit.

"I think in a lot of ways the college is on the right path of reaffirming its mission of educating students and acting with integrity, and I don't know if going to trial would have done any more to push them in that direction," Schumaker said.

Student journalists at the Barton County college were doing responsible journalism in the best tradition of the craft and the First Amendment, Schumaker said.

"They weren't doing anything at all inappropriate other than following the story that deserved to be followed," he said. "Not only do you have the whole question of censorship, but you have the question of what is this college doing? What lessons are they teaching students when it comes to being professional journalists and all that that entails?"

Allen Glendenning, the college's attorney in the case, said trustees decided to settle the case after Schartz lowered her financial demands to a level where it made more sense to settle than to continue the litigation.

The college also argued that if a teacher's duties include supervision of student activities, and she expressly refuses to do so, the college was free to take employment action without having to litigate questions about whether the refusal was appropriate.

"It is very important those students not be muzzled and the content of their newspaper not be dictated by some of the targets of their stories," Lawrence said.

Two of the five colleges publicly censured by College Media Advisers for their handling of First Amendment issues have been in Kansas. In addition to its condemnation of the handling of the Barton County case, the group also censured Kansas State University for reassigning an adviser after the newspaper was criticized for failing to cover a regional conference on black student government.

Schartz was faculty adviser for the Interrobang from 2001 until 2004, when her contract was not renewed by the board despite recommendations from her supervisors and then-college president Veldon Law to continue her employment.

Zach Becker took over the editor's job at the Interrobang after Clawson, a member of the Kansas National Guard, was called up to active duty to serve in Afghanistan.

Becker, now 21 and a senior at Fort Hays State University, had been a journalism major at Barton County Community College but changed his major to psychology after transferring to Fort Hays.

Becker published his own independent student paper, The Edge, last year as an alternative to the official Fort Hays student newspaper, which was running sexually explicit articles.

Becker told The Associated Press that Schartz taught him that with freedom comes responsibility -- and that with journalism you have to be responsible.

"Honesty, accuracy, integrity, fairness and public service -- those are the things Mrs. Schartz taught us," he said. "She taught us a lot."