UNC Chapel Hill Student Alleges School Took Down Her Website for Lampooning Admin
“restored it after a lawyer and civil rights group intervened”
The parody website poked fun at how the school handled race relations.
Inside Higher Ed reports:
Can Chapel Hill Take a Joke With a Point?
A student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill alleges that the institution took down her parody website that lampooned officials’ handling of race relations and only restored it after a lawyer and civil rights group intervened.
The website, called UNC Anti-Racist Jeopardy, modeled off the game show, asked questions about the university’s history and ties to racism and police and administrators’ interactions with activists. For instance, in the category “violence against students,” the game asks what was deployed against students at a dance party in August. Answer: pepper spray.
The accusations of censorship come at a particularly strained time for the University of North Carolina System’s flagship. UNC has been embroiled in a debate on the Silent Sam Confederate monument. And the website — which officials considered “personal work” and not appropriate for the university’s service — was shut down despite many other instances where students’ blogs were allowed to remain up. The student, Annie Simpson, said administrators likely flagged her creation because of her campus activism, partially around the Silent Sam statue.
What to do about the monument, which protesters tore down in August, seemingly spurred the exit of Carol L. Folt, former UNC chancellor. Folt announced her resignation simultaneously with the decision to remove the remnants of Silent Sam from the center of campus, a controversial move that many students celebrated but that did not erase the lingering tensions between them and politicians who liked the idea of a Confederate statue on campus.
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Comments
Actually, if it is found on their internal sites then the school has the right to remove whatever they please without cause.
This is why many school newspapers are independent.
No, it doesn’t. Student web space is a limited public forum. The school can regulate it, but only in a manner that is both content- and viewpoint-neutral.