Editor’s note: This is in response to the Daily Lobo’s decision to censor its Wednesday edition in a show of solidarity with the Central New Mexico Community College’s newspaper the Chronicle, which CNM administrators shut down March 26. All Daily Lobo stories for that day ran online, but the paper, with the exception of an explanatory editorial, had nothing but ads and X’s where content would have gone. The Chronicle was reinstated on Wednesday. For details, see “CNM paper back on stands, staff rehired,” published in Thursday’s Daily Lobo.
Editor,
While I certainly sympathize with the students at CNM whose newspaper was terminated over an issue the administration didn’t like, I don’t see how not printing the Lobo is going to help them. I can also see not printing the Lobo hurting the UNM paper’s ad revenue and denting its readership. I read the Lobo’s editorial on Wednesday on “self-censorship” but I still don’t get the logic or the solidarity of stopping the print edition.
Before cigarettes were banned nearly everywhere, community colleges were sometimes described as high schools with ashtrays.
The CNM kerfuffle over the student paper’s “sex edition” underlines the fact that students at CNM are frequently treated condescendingly or ignored altogether by the “adults” who theoretically administer their education.
I’ve taken classes at CNM over the years. CNM blatantly ignores students on many issues. The faculty and the students frequently have to “work around” an unresponsive administration. I’m talking about real, nitty-gritty problems like assigning a network computer class to a room that had no network connections and then saying, “There’s nothing we can do about it — work around it.” I had faculty there so unfamiliar with the Blackboard computer system that they could not manage to get assignments for online classes into the correct format, and who then refused to assist by saying, “Talk to IT.” IT, of course, said, “It’s the instructor’s problem and we cannot fix it. She has to.”
That loop continued an entire semester. I could go on and on. The students would probably have to do something really drastic, like go on strike for a significant period, to get changes made at the newspaper. Since CNM students are usually trying to get a degree for practical, economic reasons, they aren’t apt to strike to support something as evanescent as their newspaper. Among other things, they really cannot afford the down time. It’s a shame because there are some very good people, both students and faculty, at that institution.
Sharon Karpinski
UNM student
