Wabash paper loses funding

CRAWFORDSVILLE, Ind. -- The Wabash College student senate said it canceled funding for a conservative student newspaper after the publication insulted a professor's wife.\nThe Commentary, a 10-year-old, bimonthly publication, must now support itself if it wants to continue publishing.\nThe senate's decision has fueled a debate on the all-male campus about free speech and the private college's revered Gentlemen's Rule, which says that a student shall conduct himself at all times as a gentleman and responsible citizen.\n"We have one rule here at Wabash, and it's the Gentlemen's Rule," said senate President Brian Lawlor, a senior. "In the last issue, they called a professor's wife 'fat and ugly.' We just don't want to be associated with that anymore. This was the straw that broke the camel's back."\nThe publication has long rankled some students and faculty members at the all-male school, located about 45 miles northwest of Indianapolis.\nSean Salai, editor of The Commentary, said the paper often criticizes what it considers to be liberal faculty and that the senate just wants to silence the paper's "independent voice."\n"This represents a strike against what we feel is our freedom of speech and press at Wabash," Salai told The Indianapolis Star for Monday's paper.\nLawlor said that the paper can still print anything it wants, just without the $1,250-per-semester in college funds.\nEditors of the publication also can ask senate to reverse the decision, he said.\nThe paper, which gets alumni donations and a $4,100 annual grant from a national group that supports alternative papers, will continue to publish.\nBut editors say they can afford only four issues a year, instead of six, unless they get more funding.\nProfessor Humberto Barreto -- whose wife was mentioned in the parody that also made light of him -- said the senate has the right to take money from publications of which it does not approve.\nThe dispute boils down to a clash of viewpoints rather than a free-speech issue, because the First Amendment does not apply at a private college, said Kenneth Falk, legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.\n The parody was inappropriate and stupid, but the ICLU does not believe ideas should be suppressed, Falk said.\nThat also is the stance of Wabash's student newspaper, The Bachelor.\nThe senate's decision sets a bad precedent, said editor Jacob Pactor.\nPactor said he objects to the paper's focus on attacking people and exaggerating Wabash's flaws, but he also said students are not too concerned about the dispute. \n"Our football team has won 18 straight games in a row -- that's what people are talking about," he said.