Someone had a lot of time on his hands to do this 100 times.
- The Morris NorthStar, a conservative student newspaper at the University of Minnesota Morris, claims a professor at the school incited the theft and trashing of all distributed copies of its paper last November.
- In January, unknown perpetrators vandalized another 100 issues of the paper.
- The NorthStar is mulling filing a First Amendment lawsuit against the professor.
When is censorship actually censorship? You could ask Professor Paul Zachary “PZ” Myers, a biology professor and an award-winning scholar and blogger at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM). Or, you could ask John Geiger, a sophomore majoring in German and Global Business Management and co-founder of the conservative student newspaper, the Morris NorthStar.
Several reports have recently surfaced alleging that, in several posts on his blog Pharyngula, Myers incited students at UMM to trash and vandalize copies of the NorthStar all together worth nearly 2,000 dollars because he disagreed with the student’s conservative politics and satire-driven publication.
On Friday, Nov. 22, several days after the November issue’s distribution, Myers crafted a blog piece highly critical of the NorthStar and suggesting that the paper be treated “as trash” and appropriately disposed. Geiger reports that all of the newspaper copies then went missing from distribution sites located around campus over the weekend of Nov. 23-24.
Myers has steadfastly denied any involvement in the reported disappearance of all the November-issue copies and the defacement with a marker of 100 of the January-issue copies in late January. While Geiger admits he does not know whether or not Myers physically participated in either crime, he is currently in contact with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and mulling filing a First Amendment lawsuit against Myers. The ADF is a non-profit legal advisory and litigation group.
The ADF and Geiger came into contact after 100 copies of the January issue featuring a preview on the front page of a pro-life story were defaced with marker.
Geiger and the ADF argue that Myers’s actions went beyond his right to express his opinion and were predicated to incite censorship and theft. In a press release on their website, the ADF writes, “When a government employee engages in acts that ‘would chill or silence a person of ordinary firmness from future First Amendment activities,’ he violates the First Amendment.”
Geiger also wrote Myers a letter (which Myers posted on his blog) demanding payment for the stolen papers, 20% interest due to a two-month “late payment”, a 40% “charity” tax, and other fees amounting to 4,017 dollars in total. Geiger made several jokes and tongue-in-cheek comments in the letter intermixed with this demand, and clarified to The Cornell Review that the letter was written in a sarcastic tone.
The drama unfolding between the NorthStar and Myers can be traced back to events that occurred in October and November of last year.
In mid-November, Geiger gained notoriety on campus after hosting an Affirmative Action Bake Sale, which offered minorities, women, and LGBTs discounted prices from what white males had to pay for cookies and juice. The November issue of the NorthStar came out about a week later, and included a picture of the crime scene photo of the deceased Trayvon Martin with a caption reading: “Trayvon Martin, victim of racism and fascism, and what does [name of school administrator] have to say about it? Nothing. Not a single thing.” The article it accompanied, written by another NorthStar staff writer, called faculty members “fascist racist scum” for what the NorthStar indicated as being an opportunistic, disingenuous approach to combating racism. This article was a follow-up to a similarly-themed one published in the October issue. Though the NorthStar has a disclaimer at the beginning of every issue indicating that its articles may contain satire, no individual stories carry any disclaimers.
According to Geiger, the purpose of this photo was to question the administration’s stance on racial equality. Geiger has taken issue with institutionalized affirmative action at colleges and the insulation of UMM’s administration in “a largely white rural community” despite claiming to “[care] so much about racial equality” in the context of the Trayvon Martin case.
In response to what was most likely satire on the part of the NorthStar, across blogs posts dated from Nov. 22, 2013, to April 16, 2014, Myers labeled the NorthStar “a disgrace” and an “evil rag” written by “right wing genius” Geiger and other “self-martyred Breitbart wanna-bes”. He indicated particular disgust at the aforementioned caption and the allegations levied on the faculty and administration, calling the newspaper’s writers racists and comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan. The professor also wrote in the same blog post: “Treat their scattered papers as hate-filled trash and dispose of it appropriately.”
On Nov. 29, UMM’s Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson submitted a letter to the local newspaper the Morris Sun Tribune (which has a business partnership with the NorthStar) clarifying the NorthStar’s views are not reflective of the university’s and that the university does not fund the operation. Johnson called the NorthStar’s critique of the administration a “hateful attack”.
Several weeks ago Johnson, prompted by the marker defacement, sent an email to students and faculty at UMM indicating the illegality of damaging and stealing property. Geiger noted that Johnson did not explicitly condemn the theft.
“So you clearly have someone who is ready to condemn our actions, but not the actions of those who try and silence us. It’s really kind of sad,” Geiger said of Chancellor Johnson.
In recent blog posts, Myers has continued to write about the ordeal from his own end. He reported receiving formal inquiries from the ADF; having his Miranda rights read to him by campus police; and receiving phone calls from Fox News reporters. All the while, Myers has maintained innocence in the theft, vandalizing, and censorship of the NorthStar.
In a blog post dated April 16, Myers criticized Fox News’s Todd Starnes, who broke the story on the national scene. In criticizing Starnes and listing his grievances against the NorthStar, Myers did write “…I advocate kicking such behavior off the campus altogether.”
Whether or not a lawsuit will come to be remains unknown, but in the mean time both Geiger and Myers will continue publishing.
I go to UMM, and this paper is nothing more than a worthless piece of hate-mongering that contains 0 news stories and consists entirely of op-eds that they can only get away with because they throw a “satire alert” on the front of every issue as an attempt to protect themselves from charges of libel (despite the fact that labeling something as satire makes it not satire since it’s not hidden by clever writing, something their staff is incapable of).
That all may be true, but censorship in this case is wrong. That’s the major issue here, and that’s why the title is “Conservatives Censored on Campus” not “Conservatives Criticized on Campus.” Nothing wrong with latter, a lot wrong with former.
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