EDMOND — Leaders of the state’s third-largest university have engaged in “egregiously anti-free speech conduct” in an effort to control media coverage by ending print operations of the student newspaper, according to a letter a journalism legal group sent to school administrators this week.
The University of Central Oklahoma’s decision to stop printing the school’s student newspaper, The Vista, for the first time in 122 years amounts to a clear act of retaliation in response to “rigorous news coverage of university affairs,” according to the letter sent by Leslie Briggs, an attorney with Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The group said it is representing six current or former UCO students.
In August, a UCO student media advisory board voted to end printing physical copies of The Vista, and said it would continue publishing digitally like many campuses and other newspapers have in recent years.
While not constitutionally required to fund a print publication, the decision to stop printing The Vista comes after UCO administrators “repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with editorial decisions” made by The Vista, including coverage that “may reflect poorly” on the university and President Todd Lamb’s administration, according to the letter.
Briggs wrote that despite claims from the UCO administration that the decision to stop printing The Vista was made to cut costs, university leadership has subsequently refused to accept private donations that would pay for the estimated $12,000 annual cost to print the newspaper for another year.
“Any possible notion that UCO’s decision was animated even slightly by concerns over budget is firmly negated by the fact that UCO refused to allow The Vista to accept outside funding to allow continued publication,” according to the letter. “That is not cost-saving – it’s censorship.”
Briggs’ letter was addressed to five university employees, including Lamb and Elizabeth Maier, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Lamb and Maier deferred comment to Adrienne Nobles, a spokesperson for the university.
Nobles said in an email to Oklahoma Voice that officials had received the letter and will respond to Briggs in the coming days.
“The Vista remains an independent publication in its new digital format with editorial agency over their content,” Nobles said in a statement, adding that the publication’s student editor is among those who support the transition to digital-only.
She said many college newspapers have made the shift to fully digital prior to The Vista, including The Maneater at the University of Missouri, The Daily Gamecock at the University of South Carolina and the OU Daily at the University of Oklahoma. Nobles also cited The Daily Illini at The University of Illinois as having made the shift to fully digital, though the publication’s website says it is still distributed in print.
Briggs’ clients are demanding that the university restore editorial independence to the paper, allow it to resume printing, return The Vista’s newspaper distribution racks to campus, cease all efforts to retaliate against students for exercising their First Amendment rights and discontinue efforts to “censor content the University deems objectionable.”
In an interview with Oklahoma Voice, Briggs said that her hope is that the letter will open a dialogue with the university “so that they can actually sit down and hear concerns of these journalists and come to a mutually agreeable solution.”
“The current status of what’s going on with The Vista is unacceptable,” she said.
