From Oregon to Boston, school newspapers ruffle feathers

Two troubling reports of interference with student journalism surfaced last week from opposite sides of the country: Two campus police officers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were suspended for dumping hundreds of copies of the student paper, and the editors of a college paper in Portland, Ore. were ordered to yank an entire issue over an article the administration reportedly found "distasteful and sensationalistic."

As the Student Press Law Center reports, the two MIT officers admitted to trashing the March 17 issue of the Tech, which included an article on the arrest of one of their colleagues. The police union apologized, the SPLC says, and the university told the Tech it views the incident as a serious infringement.

In Oregon, the University of Portland, a private Catholic school, objected to the student-run Beacon‘s reporting on a student’s suicide, according to the Willamette Week, and ordered editors to remove all copies of the paper from the campus.