Despite the presence of a number of amici curiae including the Student Press Law Center, The American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Collegiate Press and The Society of Professional Journalists, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a suit brought by student editors of the Kansas State Collegian over the removal of the student newspaper's faculty advisor.
In Lane v. Simon, the Collegian became involved in a controversy when student groups and faculty at Kansas State University claimed that the newspaper contained inadequate diversity and minority news coverage. Although the student editors attempted to address the concerns in two public forums, the criticism continued, including a protest march and rally that called for the removal of the newspaper's faculty advisor.
Not long thereafter, the chairman of the board of the not-for-profit corporation that published the paper and the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at KSU wrote a letter to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences recommending that the newspaper advisor not be reappointed. According to the letter, the recommendation was based not on the controversy over the newspaper's diversity news coverage but rather as the result of a "content analysis" conducted by the chairman in which he compared the Collegian with six other college newspapers. The chairman did not believe the Collegian fared well in this "content analysis," concluding that the paper's "news reporting and writing are demonstrably weaker than news coverage in peer college newspapers," despite the paper's receipt of a number of national awards over the years. Although the newspaper advisor did not make final content decisions for the paper, the chairman concluded that the advisor, rather than the student staff, was to blame for the "sub par scope and quality of news coverage."
Following this recommendation, the dean informed the newspaper advisor that he was being removed from his position as advisor and being assigned additional teaching duties although his salary would remain the same. The newspaper advisor and two editors of the Collegian (but not the not-for-profit corporation that published the paper) then sued the chairman and dean in federal district court seeking a declaratory judgment that the defendants' actions violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments as well as Kansas state law, and requesting an order enjoining defendants from removing the advisor or otherwise interfering with the governance of the corporation that published the student newspaper.
The defendants successfully moved to dismiss the suit on several grounds, however, including that the constitutional claims failed because the defendants purportedly based their decision to remove the advisor based on the quality of the newspaper rather than its content and that the advisor lacked standing and had not alleged a violation of a federal right because his right to freedom of the press was not affected as he exercised no control over the content of the paper. You can read the District Court's opinion here.
Unfortunately, the Tenth Circuit did not address these conclusions by the District Court because it concluded that the case was moot as the newspaper advisor did not appeal the dismissal and the two student editors had since graduated and no longer worked on the Collegian.
