After my first semester of college in December 2013, I remember sharing confusion with a friend: Weren't college students supposed to be political? It had been four months, and even though we read our student newspaper every week, we hadn't encountered a single student-led march, sit-in, or protest of any kind. Initially, we blamed this on the culture of our isolated state school, but began to notice that, aside from the occasional divestment rally at a liberal arts college, there was very little going on at universities nationwide.
I began writing for the student newspaper the following semester, and while I covered several protests led by community members, students were noticeably absent.
That all changed during the summer of 2014, following the shooting of Michael Brown and the explosion of publicity surrounding campus sexual assault. When I returned to campus that fall as a newly-appointed student newspaper editor, I realized something fundamental had shifted.
We scrambled to cover rallies, marches, Black Lives Matter die-ins, and survivor speak-outs as they cropped up, both on our campus and across the country. The upcoming election and this year as a whole were rising to a boiling point and the wave of activism was consuming students and their Twitter feeds. These issues have dominated the front pages of student newspapers across the country, especially in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray.
Some of these publications approach their work with a social justice mission in mind. Rather than maintaining objectivity (which is arguably impossible, especially for student reporters who are often active members of the campus community they're writing about), many alternative newspapers (such as City Paper) and magazines sometimes act as a facet of their activist community.
When I spoke to student editors at various Baltimore student publications, however, I found they saw the responsibility of student newspapers not to engage directly in activism but to report on it as fairly as possible and represent all sides.
This means that the role of a student reporter is often that of a translator, says Cody Boteler, editor-in-chief of The Towson Towerlight (and a former City Paper intern). There can be a disconnect between the two worlds of campus life—the world of students and the world of the administration, and student newspapers can bridge that gap.
"The administration needs to know what students are thinking, feeling, and experiencing and the students need to know what the administration is honestly and earnestly trying to accomplish," Boteler says. "It can be tough, because students want things immediately and [Towson University] is a large, state-funded institution, which means change is gradual."
In other pockets of the country, this quest for translation or neutrality created rifts between student activists and student media—most notably at Wesleyan University, Brown University, and the University of Missouri. Some campus activists at these universities would not speak to student reporters due to their unwillingness to take a public stance on issues, or barred them from events so the activists could cover them on social media directly.
Asha Glover, a former editor of the Morgan State University Spokesman, says these kinds of clashes sometimes occur because most college students don't understand the role of journalists.