B.C. Calls 'Heights' Irresponsible; Revokes Funds for Student Paper

The administration of Boston College announced Sunday that it will no longer give official support to its undergraduate newspaper, the Heights, because of its "increasing editorial irresponsibility."

The B.C. Corporation will stop funding the newspaper at the end of this year, and will retract its right to use the name "the Heights." College officials claimed that a recent issue of the publication "raised questions regarding criminal libel."

The college has supported the paper until now with money raised from the compulsory student activities fee. The Heights has received $27,000 from the college for the present year, and ordinarily raises $10,000 to $15,000 annually through advertising.

The issue in question, published on February 24. contained an interview with Paul Krassner, editor of the Realist a radical monthly newspaper. In a discussion of myth in the interview, Krassner was quoted as saying, "People really believe that their leader, Lyndon Johnson, was capable of an act of necrophilia."

The college administration began its investigation of the Heights last fall when the paper headlined a review of Medium Cool, "Up Against the Screen, Mother-Fuckers."

In an article in the Boston Herald Traveler last Thursday, Cornelius Dalton, B.C. graduate and former writer for the Heights, said that the Krassner article "wallowed in the depths of depravity."

The editor-in-chief of the Heights, Tom Sheehan, refused to comment on the administration decision, or to make any predictions about the paper's future until after a Heights boand meeting later this week.