Administrators at the University of Florida want to get rid of the racks where the school’s student newspaper is available for pick-up. Why? Because the racks are dangerous in the event of a hurricane, said the university. The Huffington Post ran the newspaper’s response:
UF spokesman Steve Orlando told the Student Press Law Center that administrators’ primary concerns were safety and aesthetics. “Every time we have a tropical storm or hurricane, we have to get the racks off campus,” he told the SPLC. The university worries that the “racks could become dangerous projectiles in a storm.”
The Alligator has offered to comply with whatever safety standards are necessary to secure our racks, including weighing them down. However, we have not been told what these “standards” are. The Alligator has also previously offered to remove the racks in the event of a hurricane or tropical storm.
This “storm” argument is also absurd given that hurricanes rarely pop up overnight. We are usually given ample warning, during which we can remove the racks.
Clearly, these safety concerns are just attempts to get around the main reason for the move: aesthetics and control. Orlando told the SPLC the administration thinks our current racks “didn’t blend in with the historic look of the campus.”
But does this concern for aesthetics really constitute enough of a compelling interest for a public institution like UF to not only control the distribution of a student paper on campus, but also charge us to $100 per unit each year to distribute it? Considering that we provide a free and vital service to the university community, we cannot see any valid interest in the administration’s pursuits.
The university’s reasons for trying to control the newspaper’s distribution are obviously nonsense.
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