Student Sex Columns Still Breeding Controversy

Attempts to censor the pages of school publications are nothing new, and the territory of the sex column is quite vulnerable to such attempts. While public schools enjoy their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press, private schools often have restricted speech policies that the paper must obey. In such cases, school officials have been known to apply direct censorship, sometimes pulling issues off the stands. The Nation pointed to two examples of such censorship: In 2003, Wagner College's newspaper was removed for running a sex column, as was La Rouche College's publication in 2004.

A recent dispute between the editor of Towson University's recently independent newspaper, The Towerlight, and the school's president, Robert L. Caret, is particularly illustrative of the controversy sex columns can elicit. The Towerlight's sex column, "The Bed Post," was written under a pseudonym and its content had drawn the ire of Caret, who, according to an article in The Baltimore Sun, threatened pull university advertising, which accounts for about 40 percent of the newspaper's advertising revenue, if the column was not removed.

Caret had first sent in a letter to the editor in which he said, "This is not about First Amendment rights or freedom of the press. It's about misjudgment of the range and disposition of your audience and its expectations about what they will find in The Towerlight and what they might be appalled at seeing there." Caret then e-mailed the editor of The Towerlight, Carrie Wood, and informed her of his possible intent to pull university advertising should she not take action in removing the column. (Wood later referred to the tone of Caret's e-mail as "intimidating, patronizing and bullying.")

Wood told The Baltimore Sun she felt as though she had lost the faith of her staff (there was dispute within the editorial board about the column); she resigned in hopes that the relationship between the paper and the administration might be restored. It's important to note that The Towerlight achieved independence in 2005 after a similar disagreement with Caret, who at that time took issue with the sex column "Between the Sheets." The Baltimore Sun reported that the 2005 dispute with Caret convinced the staff of The Towerlight to become independent.

The Baltimore Sun ran a recent editorial assessing The Towerlight's sex column controversy, as well as the recent debate within University of Maryland-College Park circles as to whether it was reasonable to show a pornographic film (this prompted Maryland lawmakers to appeal to school officials to create a policy on student presentations of pornographic movies.) While the editorial questioned the journalistic value of "The Bed Post," and the educational or artistic merit of the featured pornographic film, it said that it was not up to the school's administrative officials to decide. "It should have been up to the students to come to those conclusions, not have them dictated by lawmakers and university administrators. The first lessons student journalists in a democracy learn should not have to be how to survive under the censor's arbitrary fist."

Because of both the real and perceived controversy that surrounds sex columns, many college papers simply don't run them. The [X]press, the student newspaper on my campus, San Francisco State University, does not feature a sex column. In a recent e-mail, Editor in Chief Krystal Peak cited a few reasons why her staff, as well as previous staff, have opted not to run sex columns or other types of advice columns: First, she says, there is "a certain amount of legal liability when you are giving advice, especially since none of the students are experts," and, second, "when you choose to run columns you must have one (or a small group) who have the time and writing chops to be consistent and build a voice. Generally we have and continue to discuss sexual issues in the [X]press but we have trouble with qualifications and consistency that such an impactful column would require."

The "qualifications and consistency" that Peak refers to prove to be a tricky goal for many sex columnists and their editors. The challenge editors face is deciding what the tone, or "voice," as Peak says, of the column, and whether it will tack to the informative side, the snarky, the casual, or somewhere in between. Is the intent to push the envelope for readership's sake, or is the column's purpose strictly educational?

The Baltimore Sun editorial insisted that "the whole purpose of student publications ... is to train students to become responsible journalists, and for that to happen, they need the experience of learning on their own what is and what isn't appropriate." The realm of the student publication sex column is still ripe for exploration, and will continue to serve as training ground for journalists not only concerning free speech issues but also concerning the cultural shifts in the accepted – and not so accepted – norms.