CCNY'S INDEPENDENT
STUDENT NEWSPAPER
MAY 2000 VOLUME
2, NUMBER 5
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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT
STUDENT NEWSPAPER |
Memo to Pres. Roman
For the past two years the CCNY administration has treated The Messenger as an enemy to be suppressed by any means necessary. The paper, which started out as the CCNY Messenger, a graduate student newspaper, was first attacked by the administration in the spring of ’98—the same semester it was founded. The paper ran extensive coverage of the candidates in the student government elections, the Moses administration decided it was unacceptably “biased,” and they used it as an excuse to nullify the GSC elections and defund the paper. A First Amendment lawsuit is proceeding against CCNY as a result of that episode.
Subsequently, the administration has repeatedly denied us funding for no defensible reason, despite the fact that we publish more regularly and with more column inches than any other newspaper on campus (and we believe, by the way, that the Campus and the Paper are woefully underfunded and undersupported as well).
Since the departure of Yolanda Moses and some of her hacks and the appointment of Stanford Roman as the new interim president, we have been hoping that our relationship with the new administration would begin to improve and that the politically motivated and unconstitutional refusal to fund The Messenger would cease. In some ways it seems like things might be improving—we haven’t lately discovered any hidden surveillance cameras, enemies lists or similar creative means of silencing the voices of the students like we’ve seen in the past. And in fact, as we noted on this page in the last issue, the Media Board has actually granted us funding which would at least cover our printing costs. . . in theory.
Yet that theory hasn’t yet become reality: not a cent of the funding has appeared. The bill from the printer for the last issue (ironically, the very issue which won the national award announced on the front page of this issue) sits unpaid, and as we go to press, it is unclear where the money to pay for this issue will come from. We fear we will have to go out of pocket once again, as we have been doing since the CCNY Messenger was first defunded. It’s profoundly ironic and unjust that CCNY students—already struggling to survive and stay in school—are forced to further impoverish ourselves by a handful of well-compensated bureaucrats.
According to the Business Office, the SSC’s Finance Committee refuses to honor the (student-directed) Media Board’s funding request for The Messenger.
We would like to know whether Interim President Roman is fully aware of all these machinations and supports them, or whether they’re being hidden from him like we saw in the CUNYCard scandal (see the December ’99 issue). We would rather cover more productive topics than the maneuverings against us by petty-minded administrators with a little bit of power and a lot of power hunger.
A last note: Because of The Messenger’s uncertain finances we had to cut this issue’s size from 12 to 8 pages, sacrificing “fun” stuff. The Office of Student Affairs might be pleased at that, which would be characteristically perverse of them.