Purdue University last Friday gave a two-day notice to The Purdue Exponent, the long-time student newspaper, that it would no longer distribute the paper on campus.
The May 30 letter also revoked the student journalists’ parking passes and requested that the organization remove the word “Purdue” from the publication’s name.
In the letter to the paper, Purdue said it had no plans to renew a contract outlining the terms of distribution. A statement also said, “The Foundation has no license to the Purdue name for commercial use.”
But The Exponent said that it holds a copyright to the name until 2029 and that the parking passes were part of an agreement with the university in the 1980s when the paper sold land to Purdue to build a parking garage.
The Purdue Exponent was founded in 1889. It operates under the nonprofit organization Purdue Student Publishing Foundation. The student news organization is editorially and financially independent from Purdue, it said, but the two have had some agreement to distribute the paper since 1975.
Purdue has not renewed the official agreement since 2014, but the university has continued to assist with distribution through its Materials Management Distribution Center.
The move comes as student journalists across the country are confronting institutional and other challenges to their reporting on campus.
In the statement, Purdue said that providing distribution is not “consistent with the principles of freedom of expression, institutional neutrality and fairness to provide the services and accommodations described in the letter to one media organization but not others.”
The university said the new policy went into effect June 1.
Publisher and news advisor Kyle Charters said the policy will “stifle” their ability to get news to the community.
“It just makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to get The Exponent to its locations on campus in the fashion that we have — you know, being there on mornings of our prints, which these days are Mondays and Thursdays," he said. "Buildings these days are mostly locked.”
Reporter and sophomore Quint Holguin said he was sitting at his desk when they received the May 30 letter.
“It completely caught us off guard here at The Exponent,” said Holguin. “We're a group of five journalists this summer, and when we received that email, we were floored by it. Honestly.”
During the school year, The Exponent publishes work from more than 100 student journalists.
“It's my belief that without that, news coverage of Purdue will go dark,” Holguin said of the university’s assistance with distribution.
Dominic Coletti is a program officer for theFoundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. The organization advocates for freedom of the press and expression on college campuses.
He said that institutional neutrality is a freedom of expression principle and that Purdue is misusing it.
“It's taking this concept that's designed to allow expression to flourish, and it is using it to justify cutting off expression at the kneecap,” Coletti said.
Purdue maintains that it is not preventing The Exponent from distributing copies of the newspaper.
“To the extent that the University maintains racks at designated campus access points for free publications, the [student publication] will continue to have access to those racks on a non-exclusive, first-come, space-available basis for deposit of free copies of ‘The Exponent,’” university attorney Benjamin Terhune wrote in the letter.
The Exponent said it will continue reporting despite the setbacks.
Contact data journalist Zak Cassel at zcassel@wfyi.org.
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