CHAPEL HILL – For the second time this school year, The Daily Tar Heel, UNC-Chapel Hill’s student newspaper, is in the middle of a firestorm over content in its publication. This time the criticism comes from UNC-Chapel Hill administrators.
On Thursday, the student newspaper published a controversial cartoon of Muhammad – the founder of the Islam – showing him in between two windows. In the first window – one showing Danish flags – Muhammad is quoted as saying “They may get me from my bad side.” The second window – which shows a scene following a terrorist incident – he says “… but they show me from my worst.” Philip McFee, an UNC-Chapel Hill student, drew the cartoon.
The cartoon was immediately criticized by the UNC-Chapel Hill Muslim Student Association and also by UNC Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Margaret Jablonski.
In a “Letter to the Editor” published by the student-ran newspaper on Friday, the Muslim Student Association said The Daily Tar Heel knew what it was doing when it published the cartoon.
“The intention of bigotry was clear,” the Muslim Student Association wrote in the letter. “One must question the DTH’s ethics in advancing a widely protested issue to cause a riot of their own.”
On Saturday The Winston-Salem Journal published comments from Jablonski where she questioned the paper’s editorial decision. She said the cartoon was “hurtful” and “offensive to members of the campus community.”
“Many of our national media outlets chose not to publish the original pictures or cartoons and we believe our student papers should have used the same editorial judgment,” she was quoted as saying.
McFee, in his on-line blog, disagreed with Jablonski’s assertion.
“Her commentary was unnecessary and uninformed, given the relation of the DTH to the [u]niversity,” McFee wrote. “Her opinion is no more crucial than that of the most sophomoric blogger or enraged pundit. She is given the right to say anything, as we all are, under freedom of speech, but the mother-hen dynamic she has taken, and its ramifications for the freedom of student organizations, is troubling.”
Student newspapers at the University of Illinois and elsewhere have drawn ire from school officials for running similar cartoons.
This is the second time this school year the Muslim Student Association has criticized the DTH for something published in the paper. The other time came when former columnist Jillian Bandes wrote a controversial column on terrorism and Arabs. That column had the line saying that she wanted all Arabs to be stripped naked and given a cavity-search at an airport.
The Muslim Student Association criticized the column.
The new controversy at UNC comes while a lawsuit is working its way through the federal court system that should determine how much authority university administrators have in censoring student media. The case is based on a situation at Governors State University and the student newspaper, The Innovator. In that case, the school’s dean of student affairs told the paper’s publisher that the administration would review the paper before it was published.
After courts upheld The Innovator’s freedom of press rights, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the school had the right to edit the newspaper, based upon a 1988 Supreme Court ruling that said high school officials could review newspapers.
Student journalists involved in the case have asked the Supreme Court to hear their appeal. The Court is expected to decide whether or not it will hear the case by Feb. 21.
Shannon Blosser (sblosser@popecenter.org) is a staff writer with the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Chapel Hill.