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Universities Say They Value a Free Press. Student Journalists Tell a Different Story.

The student press is facing a growing wave of censorship and institutional obstruction

College newspapers like The Harvard Crimson have broken stories of national import. But increasingly, the student press is being stifled.

In 2022, student journalist Elizabeth Wilson filed multiple public records requests, seeking access to records related to sexual assaults, alleged labor violations, and alleged administrator misconduct on Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s campus. After multiple spurned attempts to meet with employees of the public records office and a letter to the university from the First Amendment Coalition on her behalf, Wilson says, she was still empty-handed.

In April 2024, Wilson, then a reporter with the student newspaper Mustang News, sued Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, alleging that the campus violated the California Public Records Act (CPRA), which gives every member of the public the right to access public records unless records are exempt from disclosure by law. Wilson’s lawsuit prompted an immediate release of the records and ended in a settlement.

Countless campuses across the country list press freedoms and information access among their core values. But when universities are called on to answer for their own actions, these values waver. In an increasingly repressive national landscape for journalists of all stripes, Wilson is one of many journalists who have had to fight for greater transparency and communication from universities that have increasingly stifled the student press.

This is a nationwide trend on college campuses. According to reporting from Poynter, calls to the Student Press Law Center’s legal hotline rose 42 percent from the 2022–23 academic year to the 2023–24 academic year. The number-one culprit? Censorship.

Some student papers were forced to create new independent publications when their universities would no longer pay printing fees or advisors. Other universities exerted power editorially, putting pressure on editors to change content. At student papers that are entirely independent, with no advisors or funding from the university, administrators stifle reporting by forcing journalists to only go through spokespeople for information or denying students access to records.

Student journalists do vital work. They are often the first or only outlets to report on their universities. At UC Berkeley, The Daily Californian broke the story that the university had shared the names of 160 faculty, staff, and students with the Trump administration as part of a federal antisemitism probe. UC Berkeley is not alone. The Harvard Crimson was the first to investigate Harvard faculty’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. During 2024’s pro-Palestine encampments, reporters at UCLA’s Daily Bruin, Columbia University’s Daily Spectator, UT Austin’s Daily Texan and countless others were correspondents on the ground as their universities cracked down on protestors.

Meanwhile, as local news struggles to survive across the country, student papers are sometimes the last remaining outlets reporting on the neighborhoods and towns surrounding their universities. But rather than aiding this crucial work, many students have found universities increasingly impede it.

In 2025, UCLA’s Daily Bruin published an editorial claiming that reporters at the paper had made more than 70 requests through the university’s public records office that had gone unfilled for over six months. The CPRA requires that public documents be disclosed within fourteen days.

“Repeated failures to comply with CPRA—from suppressing footage to stonewalling advocacy groups—are not isolated missteps or oversights,” the editorial reads. “They reflect a much deeper institutional parasite that is........

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