We at the Daily Forty-Niner offer a shallow apology to the entire journalism department at Cal State Long Beach for learning and practicing the principles of journalism we have embraced as being protected under the U.S. Constitution.
It hurts to realize that a dean who appears to despise the students under the umbrella of “his” College of Liberal Arts governs our program. Most of us chose CSULB because we were under the impression it was a “student first” institution of higher learning.
We were too gullible.
One of the most important needs for our professional career development to be successful is the concept of amassing “clips.” Just as artists, photographers, graphic artists and other disciplines must build portfolios, we need print clippings to show to potential employers. We need them to secure critical internships for our résumés.
When we attempt to enter the professional world of journalism, printouts from websites don’t impress the hiring gods. The unlimited space on Web-version news entities allows everything to fit. They want to know that a newspaper liked our work enough to spend on paper and ink. They don’t want to read your graded class essays, either.
The current stature of the Daily Forty-Niner, which has created a climate of fear and departmental infighting, was not by our design. We weren’t here when the demise of the Forty-Niner was pre-determined several years ago.
The existing students working the Forty-Niner are merely the victims of earlier mismanagement and 90s fiscal irresponsibility. We entered under a hail of backbiting, but have tried our best to learn and exercise the intricacies of meaningful public service.
We are, however, forced to bear the brunt of the previous and current shell games proliferating this situation. CLA Dean Gerry Riposa obviously had an agenda he was ready to push upon the journalism faculty to exterminate the print version.
The decision not to attend because of student presence is an embarrassment to the university. As his quotations in local newspapers indicate, Riposa knew what he wanted beforehand. He wanted to announce his decision without the possibility of outside indignation from lowly journalism students, plain and simple.
Students who’ve been hearing the rumors felt they had the right to hear the proposal in person. Practicing the transparency ideology, we were told that journalism faculty meetings were open to students, because that’s how professional journalists roll.
If a feasibility study to eliminate, or severely inhibit, our printed newspaper was in the offing, we wanted to know about it beyond the rumor mill. Riposa’s plan had malice aforethought. He certainly must have already done some studying on the issue. You don’t just pull something that controversial out of thin air in academia.
This is overt in the fact that he came deliberately “un-prepared.” Otherwise, he would have brought his charts and statistics, which he conveniently left in his office – as he told local newspapers. For a proposal on a study this important, how could anybody show up un-prepared, student presence or not?
Isn’t anybody concerned he was willing to talk to the local press the same day about the issue, but not to his own students? Doesn’t anybody notice a pattern?
If it weren’t in the dean’s scheme to exclude students, his un-preparedness could have been easily resolved by an elevator ride to his office. But in the arena of “forewarned is forearmed,” this would have given students a chance to compile and present contrary evidence to defend their program.
Practically every major newspaper in the country has an online version. None of the survivors is ignorant enough to kill their print version, not the New York Times>/i>, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, nor any other major media players. The same holds for virtually every major collegiate publication.
Most of us who transferred here after studying journalism at community colleges and high schools were led to believe (by CSULB recruiters across several disciplines) that the president and administration at CSULB consider the voice of students to be significant.
Yet shoring up of this area of student-shared information has shown to be mere lip service. Administrative support has proven to be a fallacy to the “nth degree.” Why wouldn’t it be? Who wants to go on record as being the leader at the time one of the oldest traditions was put to death?
Doing so directly would be akin to political suicide. It’s easier to take the low road and “say” you support free speech than to soil hands and reputation by leaving fingerprints on the corpse.
Admittedly, we’ve pushed buttons that our higher-ups didn’t want pushed. By airing dirty laundry on such issues as minority underrepresentation and unequal distribution of resources, we’ve opened concerns about institutional racism.
We must be doing something uncomfortable.
We’ve exposed exclusionary and elitist practices by student government that has provided a frat boy-like backlash.
We must be doing something uncomfortable.
In the spirit of utilitarian ethics, we’ve sought, and often been eluded by, the truth on relevant issues. We’ve placed our eggs in the basket that “student voice” is paramount to ensuring the health and vitality of the institution.
The campus already has a soft news vehicle in an alternate format. It serves one purpose, while we at the Daily Forty-Niner try to serve another. We are dedicated to continuing the tradition until CSULB decides it’s time to dry up our ink well.
Part of practicing journalism at the collegiate level is experimentation and grunt reporting. As in the real world, though, our voices are being dissuaded by totalitarian ideologies. Allowing the media access to the powers that be for accountability is even supported by California’s legislature and its highest political representative.
Signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the California Public Records Act of 2004 is intended to provide transparency to interested publics. While some might say it’s a stretch to implicate those principles at a faculty meeting level, we are all that interested public.
The spirit of accessible information is the intent of sunshine laws at every level.
As the law states in its preamble (Section 6250-6270), “[I]nformation concerning the conduct of the people’s business is a fundamental and necessary right of every person in this state.”
It’s not a simple matter of what’s important to the journalism students working on the newspaper, but it’s “the people’s business.” Those people include administrators, faculty, non-classified employees, students and taxpayers.
How or why should we have expected that an educator, so well-versed in teaching the political sciences, would opt to behave like the worst kind of politician – one who ignores the rights of the people and the students under his thumb? The easy answer is because he can. Does “my way or the highway” sound familiar?
For that, and little else, we offer our jaded apologies.
