Good riddance to Rawitch

The Wall Street Journal has a great opinion piece from James Taranto about the retirement of his anti-mentor Cynthia Rawitch this week.

The short version is a student newspaper at another school printed a comic strip that mocked affirmative action policies. Left-wing students and faculty members lied about being offended by the comic and their attempts to intimidate that student newspaper lead to a student paper at a different school to publish the comic as context in an article about the overreaction.

This lead to journalism professor and unlikeable villain Rawitch to threaten and punish the staff at the second school paper, one whom grew up to be Taranto. The students ended up winning a free speech lawsuit after years of litigation, but Rawitch went on as a university employee, rising to the rank of vice provost of California State University, Northridge.

I'm glad to say that I had a very different experience at my college newspaper, even as an outspoken conservative at a far-left school. All in all, it was a great experience.

Sure, I had some trouble. I heard that the student government president bragged he could have me removed from my position as opinion editor, but that never happened. He was forced out of the school after being accused of raping a girl in the student government office over break.

A disgruntled student complained that I wouldn't print his article because it disagreed with my politics, but I showed how I tried to get him to expand on it so it would meet minimum word count requirement and he refused.

I ran into some yellers in the hallways now and then who recognized me from my headshot and one time some angry girls rolled up a pair of newspapers to the page of one of my articles and swatted me in the student union, but it was nothing I couldn't handle. The hate mail was even fun to read.

But all of that was from students. I never had any problem with the faculty, even when I ran a piece exposing a university employee's drunk driving arrest and criticizing the head of judicial affairs for his lawsuit against a fraternity that had exposed his drunk driving record.

In fact, I received a lot of positive feedback from my very liberal professors. My favorites were the ones who said they don't agree with me but respected my arguments. That was the tops for me.

I'm happy to say I never ran into a mealy-mouth Rawitch the whole time. Most journalism professors really do seem to "get it" when it comes to free speech.