Silent Treatment From Campus Leaders Hurts All

Editor's note: Black College Wire is participating in Sunshine Sunday and Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know, which begins March 13 and continues through the following week. The initiative, spearheaded by the American Society of Newspaper Editors with a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, is intended to open a dialogue about the public’s right of access to government information.

Years after I’ve graduated, I’ll remember the lessons of this year’s battle between The Meter, the president of Tennessee State University and the student government association. I can only hope that every student involved in the “Save President Hefner” debacle now understands the dangers of official silence. I hope they now see that the newspaper’s important mission includes promoting the free exchange of differing views, with the ultimate goal of fostering a positive change in the community. There have been some signs of progress, but it is obvious that some people still don’t get it.

Ashley Northington

On Nov. 7, I wrote a commentary critical of the student government’s efforts to rally support for James A. Hefner, the beloved, longtime university president whose administrative missteps cost him his job. He has resigned, and his last day is to be May 31.

I wrote: “Now they want us to wear 'Save Hefner' buttons as if he did not have the chance to save himself.” I noted that he accomplished a lot during his 14 years as president, but, “When auditors asked him about receiving Super Bowl tickets for free, he lied instead of telling the truth and then followed by sending payment to hide his dishonesty. He disregarded a 1998 mandate from Charles Smith, then chancellor of the Tennessee Board of Regents, telling him to decrease the amount of students who were awarded out-of-state fee waivers.

The university’s board of trustees was already searching for a replacement. I wrote: “Instead of trying to ‘save’ Hefner, SGA leaders should better spend their time assisting the presidential search committee [to] find a suitable replacement that will have the same dedication and commitment Hefner has.”

After the commentary ran under the headline, “SGA Too Late to Save Hefner,” Hefner gave The Meter the silent treatment.

Chauncey Davis, the SGA president, came to my office upset and said The Meter was making the campus look “divided.” After that, she refused to talk to me about Hefner and university leadership, although she would sometimes give quotes to my staff writers.

By removing themselves from the hotbed of the debate and dodging their opportunity to voice their sides of the issue, however, they did not hurt The Meter. They hurt the Tennessee State University community and they hurt themselves. The student body president was elected to represent all the students. The university president was hired to lead the university. They failed at one of the key obligations of leadership by not offering crucial information to enlighten and inform the community.

Let us hope that after all the chaos, everybody learned that silence is the opposite of an open and free society. The entire purpose of a newspaper is to report the facts, let the readers decide the truth, and to offer different ideas and opinions in the forum pages. Those pages are there for the campus leaders’ opinions, too. Unless America adopts a communist-run government, offering dissimilar opinions from people in positions of power is not a tool of division. It is the free exchange of ideas and knowledge.

Hefner refused to answer The Meter's questions after auditors from the state of Tennessee found that he misappropriated scholarship funds and accepted gifts totaling more than $9,000 from Aramark, a university food vendor.

Communicating with the press is not Hefner’s style. Instead, he wrote a letter to the Tennessee State University community stating that he made some mistakes, but giving no details. By not communicating with the student paper on his campus, he never shared his side of the story with the very people he represents and leads. And yet some people still expected students to support a campaign to “save” him.

When newspaper editors tried to schedule a meeting with Hefner to discuss his resignation decision, the presidential search and his future plans, he asked that The Meter’s questions be sent to his office.

We sent them. He responded by referring us to The City Paper, a weekly alternative publication. He said that we would find all of the answers to our questions in an article there.

Of course, the answers were not in that article. And it was simply unbelievable that our university president had the audacity to insult our journalistic integrity by asking us to rely on a secondary source and a competing publication so he could do what he had always done. He had succeeded in dodging us again.

After all the drama, I have learned one important thing. Most people respond to hard truth with feelings attached. They do not read with logical, rational eyes. They read with full-throttle emotion ready either to defend themselves or to retreat into a silent hiding place, in hopes that the news will die. News never dies.

While The Meter was enduring this, the Baltimore Sun experienced similar adversity. In November, Maryland’s Gov. Robert Ehrlich banned his administration from talking to two of that newspaper’s journalists, accusing them of bias and claiming that their stories contained inaccurate information. The ban started after reporter David Nitkin and columnist Michael Olesker wrote articles examining the Ehrlich administration's handling of state land sales. The Sun sued, saying that the governor cannot decide who reports on government issues.

On Feb. 15, a federal judge dismissed The Sun’s suit, saying the newspaper wanted greater access to the government than is available to regular citizens. The Sun vowed to appeal.

"We believe that this is a clear case of a government official retaliating against people based on what they write and say, and in a democracy, where government should be transparent, that is a very troubling thing," Timothy A. Franklin, the Sun’s editor, told staff members afterward.

"I wrote: 'Now they want us to wear "Save Hefner" buttons as if he did not have the chance to save himself."

I take from this that my experience with campus leaders has helped prepare me for a professional journalism career.

But this isn’t just about me.

Other student leaders at Tennessee State University have learned important lessons.

They now understand better that communication skills are imperative for successful leadership. Though Davis still has a difficult time speaking with me, she no longer avoids the newspaper. The student government association has begun e-mailing minutes of meetings to the newspaper.

Its leaders also have asked The Meter to let them write their own weekly column, in which they will detail SGA concerns and issues. We agreed, and the “SGA’s Corner” is expected to appear in our opinion section. It doesn’t change the way The Meter covers student government, and it gives the leaders another opportunity for their voices to be heard.

I hope everyone has learned that the newspaper is not a public relations tool to promote all positive happenings. The student leaders now understand that The Meter’s role is, as its mission statement says, to report the highlights and lowlights of the Tennessee State community in an effort to foster a positive change.

It is so important that newspapers, community leaders, government officials and university chiefs build working relationships with the understanding that each has an obligation to fulfill. These obligations will inevitably conflict, but playing the quiet game is never the solution.

Ashley Northington is a senior at Tennessee State University and editor of The Meter.

Posted March 7, 2005