Argus should not have funding cut, despite editorial

It’s easy to take the Advocate for granted; almost everyone on our staff does. But an incident occurred recently that made our team rethink our roles as publishers.

The Wesleyan Argus is a campus newspaper in Middletown, Conn., about twice the size of the Advocate. You might have heard about it via national media, after the paper published an editorial on Oct. 16 condemning the Black Lives Matter movement as a front for an anti-police organization. This was in no uncertain terms, either: The editorial went so far as to call the Black Lives Movement “not legitimate, or, at the very least, hypocritical.” For the full article, go here: wesleyanargus.com/2015/09/14/of-race-and-sex/

Before we go any further, we would like to make very clear that the Advocate does not support, and won’t apologize for, hate speech, and recognizes that often the scope of societal problems is larger than that of our own daily lives, which can make the problems hard to understand, if we have yet to walk a mile in the other group’s shoes.

The issue we’re addressing though, is the Wesleyan University student government’s decision to cut over 57 percent of the Argus’ annual funding. The actual resolution orders that the newspaper’s $30,000 budget will be reduced to $13,000, and the other $17,000 used for work studies to  create other publications throughout the campus.

This sends the message to campus newspapers everywhere: Depart from orthodoxy at the risk of your own budget.

While the Advocate does not endorse hate speech, we tolerate it, in theory. For example, it’s not a stretch of the imagination to picture this happening to a rural publication, where an extremely pro-Black Lives Matter editorial could upset the student government there. It is a common trend in history to initially degrade and hate some of the best humanitarian trends that we now view as integral to society. Which is not to say that this is the case for this editorial, just that the student body’s reaction makes it more daunting for stories that are potentially beneficial to society, yet unaccepted at the time by the general public.

Social critic Noam Chomsky said it best: “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

Keep in mind, this is all happening via a school newspaper, a publication to inform readers at a place where they go to learn and exchange ideas. If we run into a bad idea in a campus publication, shouldn’t we correct it within the same civil discourse?

We have more superficial, personal reasons, too, for our support. Most university newspapers only employ an editorial staff for two years; the staffers’ first two years are typically spent paying dues as a staff reporter.

Yes, there is clearly a lot that went wrong at the Argus that caused this trouble, but this budget reduction was a clumsy, permanent solution to a temporary problem. And the incident here is stemming from the current short-term staff, not the paper’s infrastructure.