Category: Media

Roland Klose has been hired as the new business editor of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Klose has been business editor at the Commercial Appeal in Memphis for the past three years, but he has held a wide variety of jobs in journalism during his career.

A founder’s note from Charles Klotzer: “In the print version of my article in the Winter 2013 edition of Gateway Journalism Review, I failed to note that in the late 1980s Roland Klose was the assistant editor of SJR for several years. My apologies for this oversight. Congratulations also to Klose for being named the business editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

Twenty-five years ago, on Jan. 13, 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a devastating blow to student speech and the student press when it validated the authority of the principal of Hazelwood East High School to remove controversial stories about teen pregnancy and divorce from the school newspaper over student objections. The court’s decision in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier was one of the most far-reaching decisions restricting free speech in the past quarter-century.

The First Amendment protects free expression. That, however, covers only governmental acts, “Congress shall make no law . . . ,” it says. That threat by officialdom is ever-present. But we are also facing a similar threat by private centers of power that may actually interfere more directly with our lives. Greg Lakianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), warns in a New York Times op-ed piece that colleges have enacted speech codes intended to enforce civility, “but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.”

Mary Beth Tinker, the student suspended for wearing an armband to class to protest the Vietnam War, will speak about student free expression rights at 7:30 p.m. March 11 in a forum at Webster University’s Winifred Moore Auditorium. Tinker’s suspension became the basis for a lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which decided that student free expression rights do not stop at the classroom door. The logic expressed by the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court did not sway a later court in 1988, which curbed student free expression rights with its Hazlewood decision.