Muscular free speech

We don't know about you, but the Governator's got our backs. Or he would, if we ever took this show out west and became the California Daily Student.\nOn Sunday, the California governor's office issued a public statement reporting that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill into law that will make it illegal to steal more than 25 copies of a free newspaper "to sell or barter the papers, to recycle the papers for cash or other payment, to harm a competitor or to prevent others from reading the paper." Doing so, the statement continues, "shall be an infraction punishable by a fine not exceeding $250 and a second or subsequent violation shall be punishable ... by a fine not exceeding $500, imprisonment of up to 10 days in a county jail, or both that fine and imprisonment." Furthermore, the law explicitly includes college newspapers.\nAs stated in the staff box on Page 2, readers are entitled to a single copy of the Indiana Daily Student. \nNow this might make life a bit tougher for traditional fish-and-chip shops and owners of very large birds -- but it also helps fight a popular means of censoring college papers. In its fall 2006 report, the Student Press Law Center noted that from April through June mass thefts of student newspapers occurred at Kansas State University, the University of Rhode Island, the College of DuPage (Glen Ellyn, Ill.), Johns Hopkins University, Central Washington University, Pasadena City College and Glendale Community College (both in California), amounting to about 27,000 newspapers and costing their publishers at least $13,000.\nBut that's not all. The statement from the governors office further noted that Arnie recently signed into law a bill nicknamed the "Hosty bill," which guarantees broad free speech rights for student newspapers -- even those that receive university funding (Note: The IDS does not receive University funding and is damn proud of it). This was in response to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals' ruling in Hosty v. Carter, which gave universities the same right to censor school-sponsored newspapers as that maintained by high schools. Yup, that's right: For students at many universities, they can smoke, they can vote, but if they want to criticize the university administration, they'd better confine it to their blogs. Now while the IDS editorial board has expressed criticism of this bill's vague provision banning hate speech (see our May 22 staff editorial), mildly flawed protection of campus free speech is certainly better than none at all.\nThis, then, brings us back to all the nonaction-hero governors in the rest of the country, including our own. To them, we ask: What's the hold-up? Afraid that student journalists will shed too much light on public universities' inner workings? Afraid that all those groups who nick newspapers to hide the truth or stifle campus debate will stop voting for you? Perhaps it's a fear of losing the support of that massive paper-recycling lobby? Maybe it's just us, but it seems like helping protect free, public inquiry at state institutions dedicated to teaching the principles of free, public inquiry might be good policy.