The Pennsylvanians

University administrations tend to forget that the task of the undergraduate is to learn; in suspending the publication of the Daily Pennsylvanian, the University of Pennsylvania has fallen into evil ways

A few years ago, Penn's former Dean of Men said, "The University newspaper is more than just a student publication. If the paper says something nasty about a cleaning lady, I hear about it at 9 a.m. the same morning." The present Dean commented on the reasons for stopping publication, "It is rather difficult to say exactly how the editorial board were irresponsible and distasteful, but there was no reporting in depth. News stories editorialized, they were biased and several articles showed bad judgment."

This is not the attitude of an educator, but of an administrator; it is the statement of a man who feels that he should react to the inconvenient expressions of undergraduates by preventing them. The university has the right to suspend publication, for it subsidizes the paper, but the function of a university administration is to create an atmosphere in which mistakes may be profitably made, in which doubtful opinions may be expressed, in which bad judgments are also a way of learning. Destruction of such expression is the act of a bureaucracy more concerned with its own comfort than with the education of its students.

The closing of the Daily Pennsylvanian is particularly disturbing since it was so clearly a matter of principle in the eyes of the university. The present executive board of the paper had only two weeks left in its term of office, and the Penn administration has made clear that when the new board takes office publication will be resumed. Clearly the aim was assertion of authority rather than any long-term change in the editorial staff of the paper.

This arbitrary assertion of power can have only one long-term effect: to make the editors less willing to express their opinions, less imaginative in coverage of news, more musine in their view of the university. Uneasy editors do not produce good newspapers. The university has destroyed a 77-year tradition of nominal independence in order to preserve an equally long tradition of journalistic timidity.

The Daily Pennsylvanian is not a great newspaper--and the university is doing its best to assure that it will not become one. But its problems are those of its university, and it has been victimized by the difficulties of an administration which seeks to make Pennsylvania great while behaving little. A university which tries to regulate its students' use of liquor, which is dominated by a business school just one step up from vocational training, and which requires its freshmen to wear dinks, does not foster a newspaper so excellent that administrators can watch its freedom without occasional distress.

The immediate issue which precipitated Pennn's action was, quite appropriately, a fight over the Student Government Association, an organization so beset with student politicking that one party within it advocates abolition of the system. After a particularly hectic session, the Pennsylvanian took a similar stand, and the next day, on recommendation of the SGA, the Dean of Men notfiied the paper's staff that publication was suspended.

The University of Pennsylvania has grown in stature during the last years, in the face of a substantial commuter population, an entrenched fraterntiy system, and a vastly disordered internal structure. Perhaps it cannot grow to greatness overnight. But it is not unreasonable to ask that it try.