January 11, 2005

Alvin O. Austin

Bearing in mind that this is second-hand knowledge, I'm rather irritated and want to get this out there:

As some of you may or may not know, a group of students came together at the end of last semester with the idea or running an independent campus publication at LeTourneau University. The idea was to run it better than the Yellow Jacket had been run and to make a paper that the students would want to read and would be proud of.

Plans were in place to run the first edition of the paper this Friday, and people were excited. Then President Austin found out. Without going into a whole lot of details that I'm shaky on, he called up the prospective editor of the independent paper this afternoon and told him not to publish. He furthered that if the paper was published, the staff would be expelled and the paper would be sued by the school. There was no tone of compromise, no inquiry as to the purpose of an independent paper... merely the promise and threat of a scorched-earth campaign directed at the staff of such a paper in the event of noncompliance.

Right now, I'm kind of numb. I was really looking forward to this, as a chance to do some journalism outside of the constraints of the Yellow Jacket and to get pay to do fun work. I had even gotten so far as to thinking out some fun articles I wanted to write about LeTourneau and just what a good time we could have with an unfettered paper and with a real budget that the editorial staff had secured through advertising. Talk about your let-downs...

All I want to know is how someone can do something like that to a group of his own students and claim to be a man of God and to be leading a campus in the direction that God wants us to go.

Posted by Vengeful Cynic at January 11, 2005 11:48 PM | TrackBack