Incidents at Northwestern and Harvard reveal a growing tension between traditional journalistic practices and the demands of student activists.
EVANSTON, Ill. — Jeff Sessions, President Trump’s former attorney general, was speaking to a packed lecture hall on Northwestern University’s campus last week, but the real action was unfolding offstage.
Student protesters were pushing through a back door of the building. The police confronted them and tried, unsuccessfully, to block their entrance. Colin Boyle, a student photographer for The Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper, captured it all.
After the event, Ying Dai, one of the students, saw a photo of herself on his Twitter feed — sprawled painfully on the floor — and addressed him directly.
“Colin please can we stop this trauma porn,” she wrote on Twitter. “I was on the ground being shoved and pushed hard by the police. You don’t have to intervene but you also didn’t have to put a camera in front of me top down.”
By the end of the night, Mr. Boyle had deleted the picture, and not long after, editors at The Daily Northwestern published a statement apologizing for their journalists having posted photographs of protesters on social media, and for using the school directory to attempt to contact students.
The newspaper’s response set off a national firestorm this week. Prominent professional journalists derided the apology and weighed in to note, often incredulously, that the Northwestern journalists had been doing some of the most basic, standard work that reporters have always done — watching public events, interviewing people and describing what they saw.
“The Daily had an obligation to capture the event, both for the benefit of its current audience as well as for posterity,” Charles Whitaker, dean of Northwestern’s highly acclaimed Medill journalism school, said in a lengthy statement he issued as the debate roiled the journalism profession.
The episode was the latest in a series of flare-ups on college campuses across the country, where shifting sensibilities and heightened criticism of the media have made the environment thornier for student journalists.
In interviews, some student journalists said they had addressed the clashes by adhering to what they described as core tenets of a free press. Others said they found themselves struggling to meet two dueling goals: responding to the changing expectations of the students they cover, particularly from those on the political left, while upholding widely accepted standards of journalism.
“Nobody at this point quite knows how to do that,” said Olivia Olander, 19, a sophomore who covered the Sessions speech for Northwestern News Network, a television channel on campus. “Everybody’s trying to figure out a solution and still be good journalists along the way.”
At a time when some say heightened sensitivities have become the norm on American campuses, it is not uncommon for college newspaper editors to be confronted by students who are upset at being photographed in a public place without being asked for their permission; who view receiving a text message or phone call from a reporter as an invasion of their privacy; and who expect journalists to help assuage their concerns that graphic images in a newspaper could cause trauma to readers.
Greta Bjornson, who worked last academic year as the editor of The Vermont Cynic, a student newspaper at the University of Vermont, said that student activists sometimes raised valid points about a lack of diversity on the newspaper staff. Other times, she said, they would ask to change a headline after publication, or would decline to talk to reporters.
“It’s just changing so quickly,” said Ms. Bjornson, 22. “I think it’s just a tricky time, especially to be a student journalist. No matter what you do, I feel like you’re going to make somebody angry.”
In Evanston, the lakefront suburb of Chicago that is home to Northwestern, students who were involved in the conflict over coverage of the Sessions speech said they had endured several days of painful but ultimately fruitful discussions, culminating with The Daily’s apologetic statement on Sunday.
“Ultimately, The Daily failed to consider our impact in our reporting surrounding Jeff Sessions,” said the statement, signed by eight editors. “We know we hurt students that night, especially those who identify with marginalized groups.”
In an interview, Mr. Boyle, 21, the student photographer who deleted photographs he had posted, said that while he supported the First Amendment, he did not intend to cause trauma to the people he photographed.
“There was definitely a lot of panic,” Mr. Boyle, a senior majoring in journalism who grew up in Chicago, said of his reaction to being criticized. “There was me being worried that I’m hurting people with my coverage.”
Troy Closson, the editor in chief of The Daily Northwestern, wrote on Twitter that he felt added pressure as only the third African-American student to hold the top position at the paper in its more than 135-year history. “Being in this role and balancing our coverage and the role of this paper on campus with my racial identity — and knowing how our paper has historically failed students of color, and particularly black students, has been incredibly challenging to navigate,” he wrote.
Mr. Whitaker, the Medill dean, defended The Daily, but criticized the paper’s decision to apologize.
“I have also offered that it is naïve, not to mention wrongheaded, to declare, as many of our student activists have, that The Daily staff and other student journalists had somehow violated the personal space of the protesters by reporting on the proceedings, which were conducted in the open and were designed, ostensibly, to garner attention,” he said.
In a coffee shop in Evanston on Tuesday, Ms. Dai, 23, the student who had questioned Mr. Boyle’s photograph of her, said that she and other activists were trying to challenge journalistic norms and push for a more sensitive approach to reporting that considers the vulnerability of the people whose lives are portrayed.
“We weren’t there to get in the newspaper,” she said of the protest at the Sessions event. “We weren’t there to get national attention. People still hold dear that their journalistic duty is the most important thing, and that’s not the case.”
Campus activists and student journalists have long wrestled with tensions. In 1990, students burned copies of The University Daily Kansan after an editor changed the publication’s style for referring to African-American students from “Black” to “black.” At the time, the change brought the newspaper in line with the style of The Associated Press, but it was seen as offensive by some on campus.
In 2015, students at Wesleyan University petitioned to deny funds to the campus paper after a student wrote a column voicing skepticism about the Black Lives Matter movement. And at the University of Missouri that year, an assistant professor called for “some muscle” to remove a journalist who was trying to photograph an encampment of protesters seeking action to address racial issues.
At Harvard this year, more than a dozen student groups have joined a boycott of a student-run newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, over its coverage of a student protest calling for the abolition of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
The controversy centered on the reporters’ decision to contact ICE officials for comment after the rally. Groups like Act on a Dream, the immigrants’ rights advocacy group that organized the rally, criticized the paper on social media for reaching out to the federal agency, saying that doing so had put undocumented students who participated in the rally in danger.
In a note to readers, The Crimson’s president, Kristine E. Guillaume, and its managing editor, Angela N. Fu, said that in their view a core principle of journalism was at stake in the dispute — that of contacting every person or organization relevant to a story to seek their comment.
While The Crimson’s top editors have stood their ground, Act on a Dream and others have posted an online petition demanding that the paper apologize for “the harm they inflicted on the undocumented community” and that it change its policies. The groups have said they will boycott The Crimson by declining any interview requests until the paper changes its practices.
Those signing the petition included the Harvard College Democrats; the Phillips Brooks House Association, Harvard’s largest community service organization; and several groups representing Latino and black students.
The debate has reached the student government, which voted narrowly to issue a statement criticizing The Crimson and expressing solidarity with Act on a Dream.
And there has been dissent within The Crimson. Danu Mudannayake, 21, a senior who is an illustrator at the paper, said in an interview, “We just internally want to see more done to address the concerns on campus and not uphold this quite cold front that ‘We are a newspaper at the end of the day, and that is before anything else.’”
She suggested that the era called for a different kind of journalism, particularly for student journalists.
“We can still be serious student journalists, but still have more empathy,” she said. “I think the question of empathetic journalism is, at least for us on the inside, what’s at the heart of it.”
Hadar Harris, the executive director of the Washington-based Student Press Law Center, said she saw the incidents at Harvard and Northwestern as a reflection of a polarized society beyond colleges. She said student journalists often face the pressure of reporting in real time to a wider audience, and may not have all the training and support they need.
On most large college campuses, including Northwestern’s, students manage, write and publish newspapers independently. Some publications have faculty advisers, but the final editorial decisions are generally made by students.
“No one wants to be sexist or racist or homophobic,” Ms. Harris said. “There needs to be training to enable student journalists to really cover these complicated issues without being buffeted by political concerns.”
For Robyn Cawley, editor in chief of The Daily Cardinal at the University of Wisconsin, it was a small relief that the confrontation in Evanston had happened far away from her turf in Madison.
“I was thinking, like, imagine if this had happened on our campus,” she said. “We would have sent somebody to the protest. We wouldn’t have given it a second thought. You’re out in public, you’re protesting, it’s very likely you’re going to have some sort of media coverage there.”
Ms. Cawley, who is majoring in English and environmental studies, said she had occasionally felt pressure from fellow students who have tried to exert control over the paper’s coverage. Once, she said, a former volunteer with the College Democrats urged her to take down an article, arguing that it presented them in an unflattering light.
“I was like, of course you’re not going to like it,” she said. “Good for you. That’s the point of journalism.”
Julie Bosman reported from Evanston, Mitch Smith from Chicago and Kate Taylor from Cambridge, Mass. Susan Beachy contributed research from New York.
