What should I do about the nutjobs at my school

absolutezero

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Wed Jan-26-05 01:55 AM
Original message

Poll question: What should I do about the nutjobs at my school

Edited on Wed Jan-26-05 01:58 AM by absolutezero

I apologize for the length of this, but I need some help.

Ok, the preface: I'm the Editor-in-Chief of the student newspaper at my school. Last year one of our writers, who shall be referred to as K (and is best described as :crazy:), was thrown out of the newspaper for sexually harassing our former editor-in-chief, who just got sick of his perverted pickup lines.

We also became aware that he was sexually harassing some of the young women in our Student Govt because they wouldn't give him information on an article he was writing about the lesbian orgies he thought they had after their meetings. :tinfoilhat:

When I became Editor he submitted a few articles, one was some random rant about the Iraq war but his grammar and style were vomit inducing.

Another was just homophobic raving in which he claimed that the lesbians in the student government had their gay friends attempt to sodomize him. :tinfoilhat:

His final opinion said that too many people at the school were fat and angry and that we needed better gym equipment. I was going to print it until I saw that he used me as an example of a fat angry student.

I should also add that this kid has a cult following at my school. 95% of the campus thinks he's insane but about 100 or so kids are willing to defend everything he does

A group of these kids, mostly architecture majors who I can best described as whack jobs with no concept of newspaper design, journalism or reality cornered me outside my office today and gave me an hour long explanation of why I suck.

It's going to be kind of hard to give a whole write-up of the conversation so I'm just going to list their wild assertions:

Good Grammar is subjective and restrictive to free discussion. :wtf:

The news and sports sections need to be eliminated because nobody cares about them :spank: and dedicate the entire paper to bad satire, perverted humor and K's rants. They even went as far as suggesting that I shouldn't have run a story about the inauguration because it wasn't important. (As much as I hate him it is a major event)

I'm a fascist that only prints what my friends and I like and that I delete all other student submissions.
(This is an engineering school, all the people that like writing are either on my staff or insane)

That ad revenue and - by extension - ads aren't necessary and they're just space filler. (Forget about printing cost, its just a technicality)

They told me repeatedly that I'm not accurately representing the student's views and needy to be more "edgy" (I emphasize edgy because they said it like it was the meaning of life)

They then said that they were thinking about starting a competing newspaper and that they were going to get the student government to ban me.
(we're the oldest club on campus, over 80 years in publication, and there's also this little thing called the first amendment)

That I shouldn't try to be a professional newspaper because we're in college and we should be thought provoking and controversial
(never mind that my opinions page featured some pretty controversial stuff and a picture of a dead mouse we found in our office accompanied by an editorial demanding they send an exterminator to the student center ASAP because we've been bitching for a while about this)

Nobody reads the paper and the only reason all the papers are gone is because they roam around at night disposing of them because K told them that I won't print anything they send me. (Why then do I see the stacks SLOWLY disappear? Do they throw out 3000 copies over the course of a week?)

Then they told me they were going to recycle my pathetic attempt at journalism and watched them walk out of the building, towards the dumpsters with about 400 copies of the paper. The papers are labeled as having a cost of one dollar each after the first copy which is free. We never enforce this but it's there for situations like this.

So I call the campus police (actually an extension of the NJ state police) who file a report for theft and refer the matter to the Dean of student's office. But first they ask if it had anything to do with K's idiot minions. They told me that these kids were pulling all kinds of crazy shit on campus and I was the fifth person to call the cops on them.

So now I have a dilemma. Do I press the matter and try to get them in trouble for stealing the newspapers? (before you ask, yes it is illegal to steal a free newspaper if it's being done in an attempt at censorship. A lot of colleges have had this problem)

Do I run nothing but "edgy" articles in next week's issue. Including the unedited versions of the crap they've sent me?

Do I build an army of robots whose mission will be to eliminate the K cult from my campus?

I humbly ask for your suggestions/comments/questions