To the Editor:
I am deeply saddened and outraged that our University President, Father Biondi, a man who never explains or gives reasons for any of the decisions he makes, has decided to move to revoke the current charter of The University News. The new proposed charter would take control of the paper out of the hands of the students and put it into the hands of the SLU administration.
The University News has been “A Student Voice of Saint Louis University” for 86 years. Now, Biondi wants to turn it into a paper where his appointed staff has the final say over what goes into the paper and what doesn’t; in other words, a paper full of propaganda. A student voice doesn’t mean much when it has to go through a ‘cleansing’ process by the administration.
Anyone who has read the St. Louis Post Dispatch lately knows that Biondi has been taking a lot of ‘heat’ in recent days regarding his decisions regarding the SLU Men’s Basketball program and the University itself. Is he censoring the paper because of this? Maybe. Is he censoring the paper because of past criticisms in The University News? We don’t know. Or is it because The University News had not lived up to its standards and is no longer reliable? Not a chance. The University News has received great praise this year in the Missouri Collegiate Media Association awards, as it has in the past. Basically, we have no idea why Biondi has chosen to try and censor the paper.
I think Biondi has been planning this for a long time and his timing was the key to the possible death of The University News. He waited until the last week of classes to try and slip this new charter by everyone, thinking that students were too busy with other things in order to fight it. He was wrong. Biondi tried to take control of The University News once before and failed, let’s hope he fails this time as well.
No matter the fate of The University News, let us, at the very least, hope that people outside of the university community will finally realize the kind of ‘Citizen of the Year’ Biondi really is.
Nathan Kamp
Senior, College of Arts & Sciences
