The wrong lesson: teaching college reporters to be meek.

• Author: Wallis, David
• Position: Rant

WHEN STAFFERS AT Baylor University's newspaper published an editorial earlier this year that supported same-sex marriage and likened discrimination against gays to religious intolerance, the president of the Baptist school in Waco, Texas, did not turn the other cheek. Instead, Robert B. Sloan issued a veiled threat to the paper's editors. "Espousing in a Baylor publication a view that is so out of touch with traditional Christian teachings," he seethed in the next edition of The Baylor Lariat, "comes dangerously close to violating University policy."

A board of faculty advisers promised that the Lariat would "avoid this error" in the future. Explaining that the editors would not be punished for their sins, a board member said, "It was a teachable moment." Teachable indeed. But what was the lesson?

Forget for the moment that Baylor is a private university not subject to First Amendment limitations and that the school owns the newspaper. At a crucial moment in their development, Baylor journalists-in-training learned to shut up, fall in line, and stop questioning authority. That's bad for liberty, whether or not it was an infringement of liberty in itself.

Judging by the consistently tame questioning of America's political leaders and the prevalence of "have a nice day" journalism that features countless stories on dogs with 12-inch tongues and cats that can use a toilet just like a human being, deference and inoffensiveness are lessons that have been taken to heart by many in the mainstream media.

The Baylor case is no isolated incident. Many school administrators, faced with student editors who boldly test the boundaries, react like the commissars at the old Soviet Pravda. In recent months, Barton County Community College in Kansas fired its paper's media adviser after she resisted an order not to run a letter criticizing the school's basketball coach. La Roche College, a Catholic school in Pittsburgh, confiscated 900 copies of the La Roche Courier in which a columnist dared to suggest that "condoms and other forms of contraception could eliminate unwanted babies out of wedlock." And Long Island University in New...