Campus Alternative Papers: Making Change at the Grassroots

In December of last year, Boston University's The Student Underground ran a feature about a student who'd been raped on campus. When she brought her case to the campus police the administration suspended her for violating the school's alcohol policy (she'd been drinking on the night of the rape) and let the alleged rapist off scot-free. The campus's mainstream paper had never covered her perspective on how the investigation was carried out, or questioned how BU deals with rape cases. The editors at "The Student Underground" were so outraged that they put her story on the front cover and personally slid over 2,000 copies under dorm-room doors to get it maximum exposure.

According to Dan Feder, one of the paper's editors, the article drew a heavier response from the administration than any student actions the rape case had spawned to date. When BU's PR director called in over an editorial that criticized the university's massive losses on high-risk stocks (the university lost 27% of its endowment while maintaining that community reinvestment is financially unfeasible), he made a point of attacking the rape article as well: "He called me an embarrassment to the school and to myself." For Dan, the PR director's agitation a good sign that the story shook up the school's administration and may change the way it deals with rape cases in the future.

Today, colleges and universities are more image-conscious than ever. They market themselves to alumni for funding. They compete over prospective students. They jockey for rankings in "US News & World Report." And they must constantly defend their reputations as they fight off attacks on public funding.

This has left student activists uniquely positioned to hold their schools accountable to the idealized images they project. In recent years there has been a rash of successful campaigns to get universities to stop contracting with apparel manufacturers that use sweatshop labor. Student-labor coalitions across the country have forced public and private institutions to pass living wage resolutions. In these struggles, the alternative student press precisely because of its capacity to compromise the university's public image has been crucial. As they watchdog, advocate, and push marginalized voices into the public forum, student alternative papers have concrete impacts on their respective communities.

At City College of New York, for instance, an article in "The Messenger's" latest issue got the NYPD kicked off campus. The police had been using one of the campus' buildings to survey the surrounding neighborhood without the permission of school officials, much less students. "The Messenger," which has a long history of exposing police abuses in the black and Latino community, described how the police were kicking students out of common spaces where they'd set up their surveillance equipment. Outrage mounted, and the administration had to respond. "The funniest thing," said Hank Williams, editor of the paper, "is that City College Security"who had been tacitly allowing the police to carry out their surveillance"actually showed that story to the police as proof that what they were doing was not only disrupting the college but that they [security] were getting heat for it."

At the publication I worked on in college Wesleyan University's "Hermes" our reporting on a living-wage campaign proved an integral part of its success. When Wesleyan's student-labor coalition started helping campus janitors unionize, we ran profiles of the workers. We explained the campaign's goals, the administration's objections, and the projected costs of the organizers' proposals. We broke a story on the administration's covert involvement in the subcontractor's attempt to break the unionization drive. The campaign built tremendous support (organizers soon had over half the student body's signatures on their petition) and grew into a campus-wide living-wage campaign.