College restricts distribution of our zine September 19, 1985

 

 

We still face restrictions for distributing our zine: public, private, work, play spaces.

Yesterday, the zine came out in its new format, and we found out how far we could go in distributing it at William Paterson College.

For three years, I have been allowed to put the zine in the mail boxes of various clubs.

This ceased when a real fascist was elected as the new student Government president. He’s not his own guy anyway, but a front for other interests, in this case, a guy named Morris who is bent on controlling free speech on campus.

All this actually started about three years ago, when a lot of us went to Washington DC to protest the firing of the air traffic controllers, and the college administration started to close down those clubs that funded the trip, claiming it violate the rules for involving politics in their activities.

This started a rethinking of the structure of the club system and who would have oversight, thus starting a whole new generation of oppression of free speech, free thought and the ability to gather in public.

Students gave up their access to alcohol without a fight. Then the campus bulletin board was no longer open to everyone without prior approval. Any who posted anything without a stamp could be charged, and their posting torn down. I wanted to make my own SGA stamp but never got around to it and seemed rather pointless and petty at the time.

Ripmaster called it “a Nazi Habit,” injecting his usual twisted humor into the situation.

This year they set up rules for content of all campus publications, everything had to be pre-approved prior to publication. This got extended to the radio station and even the arts magazine.

A small uproar occurred when they censored the newspaper, but not much of one.

All this bodes ill for the future, campuses turning into petty fascist states, so it’s no big surprise when they shut me down this week and said we could no longer distribute anywhere on campus.

Like this will stop us?

I suppose if they arrest us, we might make the back pages of one of the local newspapers. We certainly can’t take the college to court.

We shall see.

 

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