By Michael Miner
Editor Ronald Witteles looked at her blankly.
“I don’t know,” said Preczewski. “There was last week.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
These vigilantes could only have been emboldened by a crucial campus ruling the night before. By a 40-25 vote the Associated Student Government (ASG) senate had approved legislation transparently crafted to bridle the Chronicle. Any periodical “published three times a year or more” and distributed in hallways must be removed from those hallways by their staffs “within twenty-four hours of their distribution.” More significant, “Any written request of all residents of a room not to receive specific periodicals must be honored.”
Witteles took the position–obviously one not shared by the resident who confronted him the next night–that the legislation could safely be ignored until written requests were actually received. By last Thursday, he told me, the Chronicle had gotten about 65–“which, considering that there are something like 700 students in the dorm, isn’t particularly impressive.” His present position is that the legislation can go on being ignored because it violates higher campus authority and the First Amendment.
Well, something’s rubbing people the wrong way.
“It’s bad!” Noonan said. “It’s a bad paper. It’s not even the ideology. It’s boring. They don’t write about anything interesting. The writers are bad writers, and they play it up like the campus hates them for ideological reasons. It’s not that at all. It’s just a boring paper. It’s gotten to where people go out of their way not to read it.”
