Long before conservative provocateur David Horowitz sought to place an ad opposing reparations for slavery in a number of prominent college newspapers, before copies of The Brown Daily Herald were stolen and protesters converged on the offices of The Chronicle at Duke University, before some student editors were denounced as liberal censors for declining to print the ad and others were labeled racists for allowing its publication -- before any of this, there was a photo of two students eating fried chicken in The Stanford Daily and a letter to the editor that might have served as a harbinger of things to come.
Jamila Webb, now a sophomore at Stanford, remembers picking up the paper on February 2 last year and glancing at the front page. "I was shocked," she recalls, "and I was like, 'I can't believe they put this in here.'"
What Webb saw was a photo of two black students eating fried chicken, accompanied by the caption, "Let's do lunch: Warrick McDowell and Edjah Nduom kick off Black Liberation Month with a fried chicken lunch at the Cage in White Plaza."
Webb joined several other students in authoring a strongly worded letter to the editor that was published in The Stanford Daily one week later.
"The Daily itself rarely has pictures of African Americans or articles specifically addressing their community events on the front page," they wrote. "In the one instance that this was not the case, The Daily depicted African Americans in a cartoon-like and uncivilized manner -- McDowell's mouth full of food, for example -- in the same way that many racist publications have in the past."
It was, as college newspaper controversies go, a minor one, and The Stanford Daily, by all accounts, handled the situation with maturity and poise. The editor hired a black student to help the paper improve its community outreach and provided sensitivity training sessions for its photographers. The controversy soon disappeared.
At its core, however, the episode had been about more than a single photo of questionable taste. "Most people I know in the African-American community don't really read The Daily," Webb says of her peers at Stanford. "It really doesn't address the needs of the African-American community."
If relations between Stanford's minority community and its student journalists had been strong, then a photo of two students eating fried chicken might not have been such a big deal. And, likewise, if minority college students and campus journalists had been at peace in the nation at large, then David Horowitz would have had to try a lot harder to set off the national melee he wanted and got.
It seems to happen every few years: A racial incident involving a prominent college newspaper sparks heated reaction from minorities. Newspapers are stolen, charges of racism are leveled, freedom of the press is invoked, and stiff statements are hastily released by nervous university administrators. In 1993, the epicenter was the University of Pennsylvania, where a group of students reacted to the provocations of an extreme right-wing student columnist by stealing nearly the entire press run of The Daily Pennsylvanian; this March, it was The Brown Daily Herald that students launched into the national spotlight with the publication of Horowitz's inflammatory ad and subsequent theft of papers by angry students.
And each time it happens, administrators, students and professors rush to focus on the details -- Were the newspaper's actions racist or just provocative? Should students who steal newspapers be prosecuted? -- and miss an opportunity to ask a larger, more important question: Why do college newspapers have such strained relationships with the minority students they cover?
Part of the answer is that college newsrooms are overwhelmingly white and Asian. At Princeton, though The Daily Princetonian boasts a staff of about 100 students, it has only a handful of black or Latino members. And the situation is no better at many other elite schools: Invariably, when the editors of the eight Ivy League newspapers gather twice a year for an informal conference, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to locate a black or Latino face in the room.
Some papers have been more successful at attracting minorities than others. But nowhere is the record particularly impressive. And at Brown, where protests and allegations of racism following the newspaper's publication of the Horowitz ad were particularly spirited and stinging, the record has been far from strong.
"It's sort of a vicious cycle," says Katherine Boas, editor-in-chief of The Brown Daily Herald, which has one black student on a staff of about 175. "They're convinced we're racists and that we're a white paper serving a white community."
The low percentages don't seem to be for lack of interest in journalism on the part of minority students. Each September, hundreds of students, many of them minorities, descend on The Daily Princetonian's open house. And yet, by mid-October, the paper is almost always left with a mostly-white contingent of freshman writers.
Competing theories abound as to why minorities don't join campus dailies. Greg Pessin, editor-in-chief of The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper, subscribes to the commonly held belief that newspapers -- one of the most time-intensive activities on college campuses -- are unlikely to attract students who need to hold work-study jobs or pay back loans. Minority students, who are disproportionately likely to fall into these categories, may be initially attracted to campus newspapers at the start of freshman year, only to discover that commitments at the paper make it difficult to hang on to real jobs elsewhere on campus. Nadira Hira, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily, posits that peer pressure within minority communities forces freshmen away from college newspapers, which are all too often seen as white establishments hostile to the interests of minorities on campus.
Daniel Hernandez, editor-in-chief of The Daily Californian at U.C. Berkeley, is one of the few Latino students at the helm of a prominent college newspaper. Freshman year at The Daily Californian, Hernandez recalled, was a "cutthroat, sink or swim" experience -- all the more difficult to endure among a group of mostly-white peers. And with few familiar faces to turn to in the newsroom, Hernandez says he can understand why so many minority freshmen have opted not to stick with The Daily Californian -- or any other college newspaper.
Whatever the cause of the problem, the results have been, by any standard, disastrous for collegiate journalism. With little diversity in the newsroom, papers often miss -- or misinterpret -- stories. I recently finished my term as editor-in-chief of The Princetonian, and I can't count the number of times we learned about a story at one of Princeton's eating clubs when a reporter walked into the newsroom and asked, "Hey, did you hear about this?" But with almost no black and Latino reporters, we never had one of our writers walk into the newsroom following a night at Princeton's Third World Center or at one of the school's other ethnic organizations and say, "I saw something tonight that would make for a great article."
It's a vicious cycle. Minority students notice this shoddy coverage and conclude that the daily college newspaper isn't for them. Worse still, they stop reading. A black student recently told me that he picked up The Daily Princetonian for the first time as a junior. If a student -- any student -- at a small university can go three years believing its daily newspaper is irrelevant to his life, then the editors of that publication have a lot of soul-searching to do.
"It's hard to figure out a way to remedy the problem," Michael Mirer, editor-in-chief of The Columbia Spectator, says of the cycle that perpetuates poor coverage of minority issues on campus and leads to low numbers of minority journalists. "We'd like to. But we're not really sure how to do that."
But there is one overarching reason why the cycle needs to be broken -- and soon. For students hoping to break into the world of professional journalism, the daily newspaper is the primary training ground. When we look at the editors and writers of the country's college newspapers, we could well be looking at the future of American journalism. The American Society of Newspaper Editors recently reported that the percentage of professional journalists at daily newspapers who are minorities fell in 2000 for the first time in 23 years. And if the current composition of college newsrooms is any indication, then that one-year blip could be quickly maturing into a disturbing trend.
So when the editors of The Brown Daily Herald glanced outside their windows last month and saw protesters, I hope they were seeing the big picture. They were right to condemn the theft of their papers, and reasonable people can disagree as to whether they should have published Horowitz's ad in the first place. But if there were black and Latino students in the newsroom, if minority students felt their hard-won place in campus life was adequately reflected in coverage of the news, then chances are that a trashy ad by a controversy-seeking activist wouldn't have caused such an uproar.
There is no short supply of ways to alleviate the problem. Some papers have begun offering financial aid programs to low-income students to compensate for the long hours they spend at the paper -- time that could have been spent at other campus jobs. Others have stepped up their recruiting efforts, targeting prospective minority students when universities bring them to campus for special orientation programs or simply sending editors to meetings of ethnic organizations to raise the paper's visibility among minorities on campus. And some papers have also attempted to tackle the problem from the other angle, hoping that an increased emphasis on covering minority issues would change perceptions about the newspaper, in turn making recruiting easier. For instance, on the heels of this past summer's acclaimed New York Times series on race in America, both The Daily Princetonian and The Daily Pennsylvanian this fall published ambitious multi-part series about race relations on campus. It was in the wake of The Princetonian's 10-part series on race that a black junior told me those were the first articles he had ever read in our newspaper. I was saddened that someone could go three years at Princeton without reading The Princetonian, but thanks to the series on race, for this student at least, it had not been four.
For the quality of their newspapers -- and for the future of American journalism broadly -- college newspaper editors must take on the challenge of diversifying their newsroom and news pages. In the meantime, the David Horowitzes of the world will continue to flick sparks in the direction of campus powder kegs, and get all the attention and controversy they so desperately crave.
