A lawsuit against an Illinois university by three former university newspaper employees entangles a web difficult to unravel.

Margaret Hosty, Jeni Porsch and Steven Barba, all former employees of Governer’s State University newspaper, The Innovator, filed suit in January of 2001 alleging administrators insisted on reviewing stories before they went to print.

Hosty and Porch said GSU administrators and faculty did everything in their power to inhibit the employees’ first amendment rights.

“Jeni and I had alerted the university administration to our English department coordinator, Rashida Muhammad, of having committed racial and religious discrimination, denying us our rights to serve on the University Curriculum Committee in our capacity as former student senators,” Hosty said.

Hosty alleges the administration also imposed conveniently invented policies designed to further depress their presence at the univeristy including covertly deleting them from class rousters, thus effectively slowing their graduate work and eligibility for financial aid.

“We also filed official grievances against the university President Stuart Fagan and dean of CAS (college of arts and sciences) Roger Oden for having defamed us throughout the entire university in their having published accusatory, hostile and emphatically untrue statements about our ethics motives for having criticized them in their paper,” Hosty said.

GSU essentially wishes to have the same powers of prior restraint given to high school administrators in the seventh circuit following the Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier decision.

“Equating high schools to colleges is an absolutely ludicrous step,” James Tidwell, Eastern professor of journalism and communication law, said.

Tidwell said publications that prove to be an independent public forum

and provide their own funding are exempt from any notion prescribed in the Hazelwood case. The Innovator is currently funded by funds allocated by GSU.

In November 2002 a federal trial court judge ruled some of the administrators involved in the case qualified as government actors making them immune from the suit.

Hosty and Porch served on student government as well as being editors of The Innovator which is a violation of journalism

standards and considered by journalism professionals to be a conflict of interest.

Their dual positions of power may have increased the aura of conflict between them and administrators.

Porche likened GSU to a third-world country. She said other university publications may question their journalistic integrity from the outside, but she and Hosty are simply doing the best they can with limited resources.

Hosty said they knew people view their former positions as a conflict of interest, but that a new age of reporting/editorials is becoming more accepted.

According to Hosty, GSU is a commuter school comprised of working adult students. Extra-curricular activities are not an option for most students, so if she and Porche didn’t fulfill both functions, “nobody else would.”

According to a court brief filed by Attorney General Jim Ryan supporting GSU, the students were never officially restricted from printing the paper and instead chose not to continue operations on grounds of conflict with administrators.

Hosty and Porche said they were dismissed.

The same brief reported that around late October of 2000 GSU Dean Patricia Carter called Charles Richards, president and owner of Regional Publishing and printer of The Innovator , requesting that Richards allow her to review the paper before it went to print.

Carter explained her intention was to review the paper for compliance with the University’s standards for grammar and correct punctuation as well as journalistic standards.