Duke University Prof Under Fire for Banning Student Journalists from Class
“Anyone who is on the staff of The Chronicle is not permitted to take this class”
When student journalists caught wind of this, what do you think they did?
The Washington Examiner reports:
Duke University class syllabus bans student journalists from enrolling
A professor at Duke University found herself in hot water after the editor-in-chief of the school’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, questioned a controversial policy listed on her course syllabus.
On the online syllabus for “Inside Hedge Funds,” economics lecturer Linsey Lebowitz Hughes appears to have banned journalists under a heading entitled “IMPORTANT NOTES.”
“Anyone who is on the staff of The Chronicle is not permitted to take this class. Please honor this in order that we can continue to get high quality visitors & information,” the syllabus reads.
Likhitha Butchireddygari, the editor-in-chief of The Chronicle who broke the story, reveals that the specification isn’t new. Fall 2014 and Fall 2015 course syllabi spell out the same restriction.
While the wording seems pretty clear, Duke’s associate chair in economics, Emma Rasiel, told The Chronicle that the language was not supposed to be taken at face value. Rasiel argues that it was just a “poorly worded attempt to remind students that the comments of guest speakers should be considered ‘off the record’ and not reported in the media or on social media.”
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Comments
If the professor’s attempt to communicate “off the record” is so poor, what does that say about his in-class presentation?
Honestly if I were at Duke, this little controversy would make me more likely to want to take this class!
It begs the question of why those lectures should be “off-the-record” in the first place.
Does “high quality visitors and information” need to be secret? Just so they can tell the little snowflakes anything they want and not be held accountable for the truth?
First off, this can’t be allowable in the school’s policy handbooks, so it’s more empty threat and “poorly worded” as the chair said.
Secondly, I can see the distinction the professor is attempting to draw, poorly executed as it may be. There is a capacity as a student and a capacity as a journalist that are two separate responsibilities, unless you are writing op-ed. With all of the activist dickhead wannabe journalists though, those lines are definitely blurry in today’s era.