Freedom of press
Obscene words make trouble for college papers
By JIM GRAHAM Kansan Staff Writer
When and where to use "obscene" words in college newspapers has produced a raging battle between students, college editors and university administrators throughout the nation.
At Indiana's Purdue University, the editor was dismissed after repeated use of what the administration ruled "dirty words."
His dismissal split the campus into opposing factions and a boycott of classes was threatened.
Editor of the student newspaper at Grand Valley State
College in Michigan was recently in jail until $5,000 bail on obsenity charges could be raised. College officials temporarily suspended the newspaper's publication.
The former adviser for the student newspaper at Detroit's Wayne State University called the publication "not a newspaper, but paranoid, racist pamphleteering."
KU's campus paper, the University Daily Kansan, with its 12,500 circulation has not encountered these problems on the surface.
In recent history only scattered incidents have occurred concerning "freedom of the press."
One such incident involved the article "The Good Niggers of Education" by a UCLA English instructor. The Kansan chose to run the entire article but the printing service censored some four-letter words.
"I don't like to see it. I don't think it's good journalism to print obscene words," said Robert Jaeger, assistant director of the printing service.
Jaeger added that the typesetter censored the article without instruction from anyone.
The Cottonwood Review, KU's literary magazine, encountered similar difficulties when the printing service refused to print a poem by Bill
Berkowitz, New York, N.Y., senior, because it was obscene. After a note from Provost James R. Surface was sent to the printer, the poem was included in the forthcoming issue.
When Mark Rudd, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) leader of the Columbia revolt spoke at KU, the Kansan included the first and last letters of a four-letter word with two asterisks in-between.
"Without censorship people would abuse freedom using words for shock value," said Gus di Zerega, Wichita senior.
Inconveniences of freedom from censorship are weighed by greater dangers of censorship in which any group of people place
themselves as the guardians of the people, di Zerega added.
Monte Mace, Garnett senior and former editor-in-chief of the Kansan, explained his views: "You must keep a certain dignity in a newspaper. When the four-letter words are relevant to the story, they should be used, but when they are used for shock value, they shouldn't be."
Mace helped write the by-laws which now govern the newspaper's policy on the use of "obscene words."
"I think there should be a survey conducted among students," he said. "I think they would vote against the indiscriminate use of four letter words."
Minis at Princeton
PRINCETON, N.J. (UPI) Princeton University, which has a plan drawn up to admit women but no timetable for it, hosted 800 mini-skirted coeds this week on a trial run which by yesterday showed there will be rough spots on the road.
"There's a forced artificial atmosphere about the whole thing," complained a freshman. The student newspaper nominated a junior, who conceived the plan, for the "annual hoax award" for persuading a "gullible" administration to go along with it.
The boys complained the girls are "not really participating in classes" while coeds find "resentment" among the men students.
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