The Spectator organisation is run by undergraduates from different institutions of Columbia University in the city of New York including Barnard College, Columbia College, the School of General Studies, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The headline referred above might be alarming in its nature for readers as incidents of sexual assault on college campuses never lose their shock-value. But I was surprised owing to a completely different reason.
Copies of this paper were available at almost every department, college, institute and center of the Columbia University. The bold story having good display and availability of the paper at everywhere reminded me of a lab-paper which I with a team of other four class mates published from Department of Mass Communication (now Institute for the Communication Studies), University of The Punjab, Lahore, as part of our Master’s programme during session 2011-2013. It was the first paper of its kind ever published by students as part of their study at mass communications department. It was a four colour and four page full size newspaper. We published different kinds of stories in it and were very happy once we saw it in print as we had ourselves gone through the news, composing, editing, page designing, pasting and layout designing.
But when we, along with our instructor, presented it to the chairman of the department, instead of appreciating us, he went berserk as he saw no promotional news about himself or the department. My arguments in favour of our current coverage added more fuel to the fire of his rage for which I suffered throughout my studies — and also after I graduated. Despite being a position holder during my master’s degree, I could not get admission in the M.Phil programme.
Seeing contrary examples of both of the college newspapers one can judge how institutions are encouraged to flourish and how their way to progress is hindered. The Columbia-run newspaper did not shy away from publishing a story that may bring a bad name to the university. The Spectator was founded in 1877 and has been financially independent from the University since 1962. On the other side, no newspaper is published from the mass communications department of the University of Punjab.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 3rd, 2014.
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@Anticorruption: as someone who read my college newspaper everyday when I was going through college, i couldnt agree with you more!
You should write another piece titled 'college run newspapers in the US vs. our national newspapers.' Because many college run newspapers in the US have better editorial controls than our national newspapers including ET