Sunday, November 21, 2004
The Phoenix New Times ran an article a couple of days ago about Arizona State University president allegedly putting pressure on administrators to coerce and intimidate the the State Press, the independently run campus newspaper. The president allegedly was pressuring the editor and others because of a story the paper ran about body piercings, including a photo of a woman with a nipple pierced. ASU top donor and alum Ira Fulton saw the photo and was allegedly irate. He called the president, Michael Crow, who then began to pressure the paper.
Apparently, the magazine cover caught the eye of Ira Fulton, ASU's most generous donor. The founder of Tempe-based Fulton Homes has given $58 million to the university in the past year and a half, including a $3 million gift announced earlier this month. His first gift of $50 million in June 2003 spurred the renaming of the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.
The photo of a bare breast, erect nipple and all, on the cover of the student newspaper's weekly magazine, prompted Fulton to contact Crow's office directly to voice his displeasure, according to internal e-mails obtained by New Times. But rather than informing Fulton that the State Press, an ASU institution since 1890, was editorially independent of the university and that the administration had no right to dictate the paper's content, Crow reacted by ordering a subordinate to intimidate the State Press and its student editors -- threatening to sever all financial support for the newspaper, according to e-mails and State Press editor in chief Cameron Eickmeyer.
Later:
According to more than a dozen interviews with faculty, students and university administrators, along with hundreds of pages of e-mails and correspondence New Times has obtained, Crow is compromising academic freedom and First Amendment rights in order to curry favor and entice wealthy donors into giving millions of dollars to the state's largest public university.
Whether it's keeping the Commission on Presidential Debates at bay, cowering to Fulton -- who also happens to be a George W. Bush elector in the Electoral College -- or coddling Fulton's fellow members of the Mormon church, Crow is obviously so determined to maintain such a controlled environment that he's trying to scare the campus of 55,000 into submission.
And that includes the university's free press.
The report is rather lengthy, but it is an interesting read nonetheless.
1:19:00 PM
|
|
