Censors and the News

The Boston University News Exercised the freedom of the press last week and was prompty trampled upon by every self-appointed censor in the university. That the paper will probably survive is testimony only to the tenacity of the students who write it. And still unanswered is the question of what will happen the next time the News takes a controversial stand.

In last week's episode, editor Raymond Mungo drafted a centerfold editorial proposing that the university stop giving credit for ROTC courses because they represented a form of indoctrination to a military set of values. The editorial asserted that "since its institution here [at B.U.] in 1919, ROTC has not changed its futile and pathetic stance: that war can solve our problems and that school is the place to train men to go to war."

The B.U. Student Congress, in its first meeting of the academic year, debated for more than an hour a motion to censure the News for editorializing against ROTC in its articles and interviews as well as on its editorial page. One had only to read the issue in question to discover that the charge had no basis in fact. But censors, at B.U. as everywhere, rarely read; they attack, they condemn, which they bring their own prejudices and opinions to issues on which they will admit of no legitimate opposition.

Fortunately the News proved able to withstand the onslaught. While teachers and students, organizations of teachers and students, and even a Boston newspaper of two lambasted the News for questioning the academic merits of military training, Mungo and his staff persisted in their right to challenge accepted institutions, rules, ideas and men. That remains the ultimate task of a newspaper.