Last week, The Georgetown Voice’s editorial board railed against THE HOYA for letting a sensational, fetus-filled pro-life advertisement slip into the newspaper.
The Voice had a point. It was a stupid ad and a dumb mistake on THE HOYA’s part, and, to its credit, the newspaper apologized for it.
But while The Voice rightfully criticized THE HOYA, it ignored a much bigger issue: The Independent, The Voice and THE HOYA censor themselves, and nobody seems to care.
As a former HOYA editor in chief, I have a special responsibility for what has happened, and there’s no excuse for it.
From the university’s perspective, the ad in THE HOYA was offensive but probably acceptable.
But guess which types of advertising are supposedly banned, according to the Center for Student Programs? Ads for contraception, egg and sperm donation, and birth control, among other things.
CSP Director Martha Swanson says there’s a distinction between advertising (whether paid or unpaid) and regular written content. Students can write whatever they want, she says. She has a point, because, as far as I know, Georgetown has never censored editorial content.
But in 1989, John J. DeGioia, then the dean of student affairs, got so mad about a proposed pro-choice ad that he threatened to shut down THE HOYA. The Voice and THE HOYA responded by halting publication, then printing a joint issue calling for the revision of the university’s policies.
At THE HOYA, like at other newspapers, most advertisements are unsolicited, submitted to our business office. If the ad is accepted, the newspaper accepts money. Sometimes we run public service ads for free.
Most ads aren’t our writing, but advertising is a type of content, too. Some ads make statements every bit as meaningful as the words on opinion pages. And we’re just as responsible for ads as for editorial content.
The university has the right to boss around student newspapers. After all, Georgetown technically owns them all.
But if Georgetown really cared about free speech and press freedom – as it claims to – students would be deciding which ads are appropriate, not faculty and administrators.
It’s not that THE HOYA should print every ad it gets. We should respect community standards of appropriateness. If the paper wants to ban certain advertisements, that’s its prerogative.
What’s scary is Georgetown’s trying to dictate those standards to students. It’s fundamentally violating its pledge to support free speech.
What’s more scary is that we just accept it.
There’s no actual written university policy that everyone agrees prohibits controversial ads from student newspapers.
According to Swanson and THE HOYA’s business director, ichael Masterson, the official policy was lost long ago. It simply doesn’t exist anymore.
All that exists is something CSP distributed to student papers last semester: an “agreement” that indeed appears to ban certain advertising, but wasn’t ever actually agreed to by THE HOYA. It’s an agreement no self-respecting student publication would ever sign.
So these days, THE HOYA’s advertising policy is based on a series of assumptions about what “we know would get us in trouble,” according to Masterson.
Confused yet?
To recap: Georgetown wants to censor us. But the student press actually censors itself based on university administrators’ directives that have no basis in any legitimate written policy.
THE HOYA has accepted this status quo for years, as have The Voice and The Independent.
Occasionally, someone writes a desperate-sounding editorial like the one THE HOYA ran on Oct. 19, 2004 (“You Call This a Free Press?” A2). “You should be angry – but not at THE HOYA,” the editorial says as it whines about university censorship.
Just like The Voice’s editorial last week, the 2004 editorial missed the point. It dodged responsibility. We have nobody but ourselves to blame.
If you care about free speech, you should be mad at THE HOYA, The Voice and The Independent. You should be mad at every HOYA editor in chief – especially me – who has spinelessly let the university have its way without fighting back, without pushing for change.
There’s no excuse, no way to get around it. I saw what was happening but never challenged it, deluding myself into thinking there were more important issues to tackle. Maybe that makes me most guilty.
This should be an embarrassment to everyone – not just our student newspapers, but the entire student body. This is no way for an elite university’s newspapers to operate. It’s wrong to silence speech.
But nobody seems to care. And that’s the biggest embarrassment of all.
Moises D. Mendoza is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and former editor in chief of THE HOYA. He can be reached at mendozathehoya.com. DAYS ON THE HILLTOP appears every Tuesday.
