I wrote earlier this month on the ham-handed efforts of Fond du Lac High School administration to censor the high school’s magazine, Cardinal Columns, for largely spurious reasons.

My blog mentioned one of my more fun stories to do, about a high school’s underground newspaper. One of that underground newspaper’s staff was Ben Bromley, who now writes:

The good thing about censorship of student publications – the ONLY good thing – is that it’s an educational exercise.

Students learn so much in fighting for their First Amendment rights. They learn the extent of their resolve. They learn that the ideals of the Bill of Rights extolled in the classroom aren’t so revered by school administrators intent on protecting their fiefdoms. …

The struggle of the Cardinal Columns staff calls to mind my own nearly a quarter-century ago in Lancaster. In May of my senior year, I was working with my co-conspirators to plan the final edition of our underground student newspaper. We were coming off our swimsuit issue, which featured the heads of students and staff grafted – using scissors and glue — onto models’ bodies. Remember, this was 1991, when nobody had Photoshop and Madonna didn’t have a British accent.

Our paper wasn’t as hard-hitting as the Cardinal Columns – instead of investigative articles about rape and expulsion, we featured fictitious faculty profiles and a tongue-in-cheek advice column. It wasn’t the New York Times. Or even the Country Valley Weekly Dime Saver.

But we clashed with school leadership nonetheless. Our first issue criticized the quality of the sanctioned student newspaper and the faculty’s oversight of it, a stance that earned me a trip to the principal’s office and got my paper kicked off campus. An article about the junior varsity football team getting into a fight after a blowout loss got me dragged into the hallway for a dressing-down by the coach. I kept extra pairs of underwear in my locker that year.

On the plus side, being renegades meant we didn’t have to operate through official channels. School administrators could block us from distributing our paper on school grounds, but couldn’t stop us from publishing. We spent most of the year handing out our paper across the street before school, even on bitter mornings. It was the first of many warnings about how cold journalism is, all of which went ignored. Here I am, a generation later, still writing screeds in protest of censorship.

Censorship of the Cardinal Columns prompted Fond du Lac High students to organize a protest, a sit-in that was short-circuited when students were threatened with citations for truancy or loitering. About 10 moved their protest across the street. Others were herded into the school theater, where the principal listened to their concerns and answered questions. Here’s another key lesson: Our freedom to express ourselves and assemble peaceably is celebrated down the hall in civics, but disregarded when it becomes uncomfortable for school leaders.

What are Fond du Lac’s students learning from their educators? That the First Amendment should be observed only when it’s convenient for those in authority. That journalism shouldn’t challenge the powerful. That administrators care less about students’ rights to self-expression than they do about protecting their fiefdoms from threats real or imagined.

One of Bromley’s co-conspirators apparently is now a principal in Illinois. (Oh, the irony …) He wrote on Facebook about how he has in the past asked students to read their notes because quotes in stories were placed out of context, or pulled graphics because they violated school alcohol and drug policies, and spoken to students about “the quality and content of their work.”

That is not inappropriate. As was pointed out in a Facebook response to my original blog, school administration takes the role of publisher of an official school publication. More importantly, student journalists do need adult supervision, because any of them who (foolishly decide to) become journalists will have editors and publishers above them, so they might as well get used to having their work scrutinized. The educational process includes educating student journalists.

Unfortunately, most school administrators have had no journalism training at all, and you can look to the Cardinal Columns controversy for the logical result. And in the era of the Internet, administration heavy-handedness encourages going online, or to social media, off official channels and away from adult supervision.

The other, and presumably unintended, consequence of this was that this ended up in the media anyway. The Fond du Lac school administration’s efforts to keep the controversy out of the prying media’s eyes failed. Bromley’s principal’s efforts to get the underground newspaper off campus ended up getting it in the city’s newspaper, whose circulation was 10 times the student newspaper’s circulation.

(Irrelevant aside: I believe I played, if that’s what you want to call it, softball with Bromley’s father on the newspaper’s late softball team.)