Across the country, college students are being censored by administrations
Story by: Bowen Darling
The Vista staff, a student publication at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), receives an email from administration. Their distribution racks can no longer be found on campus and their audience has to jump through hoops to find The Vista Online. But at least there’s a party.
The UCO administration alerted The Vista’s staff at the end of the 2025 spring semester that they were no longer allowed to print and distribute physical copies of the publication following a series of articles that painted the university in a negative light. The articles included coverage of a campus suicide, Narcan vending machines being denied by the campus, and a vote of no confidence regarding the university’s then incoming president, Todd Lamb.
“The school didn’t really want us to write about [the suicide], but we felt like we needed to.” Andrew Frazier said. “Pretty soon after those stories ran, all of our racks were removed from campus without us being told. So that obviously was a pretty big, like, red flag. We were like, ‘What’s going on there?’”
The racks were brought back for the rest of the semester but were permanently removed over the summer and the staff was alerted again that they must convert to a purely digital publication. A student advisory board that helped create The Vista’s budget had already created plans to shift focus to online, which is customary as less audiences interact with print, but these were cut short by an administrative decision to immediately halt physical distribution. The only thing administration offered was refreshments for a “farewell print” party. The advisory board began holding open meetings attended by students, professors, and Oklahoma journalists.
“[Atendees] were just concerned about kind of the suppression of free speech, or what they believe was censorship, what I believe was censorship and expressed concerns,” Frazier said. “but by the end of the summer they said no paper for you guys.”
Frazier, along with several other Vista staffers, established an independent magazine, The Independent view–or The Indy–so they could continue distributing news to their campus.
“It’s not really a place people are reading the news about it a whole lot, like unless it’s kind of shoved in your face or you see a news rack or something like that,” Frazier said. “And we were obviously put off by the censorship type of deals that were going on, so we started up The Indy.”
Jonathan Gaston-Falk, an attorney for the Student Press Law Center (SPLC), sees cases similar to this one every day. Creating an independent newspaper is a common solution for students outside of New Voices states facing administrative censorship. A New Voices state is a state that has passed New Voices legislation, laws that protect high school and college student journalists and their advisors from administrative censorship. Currently 18 states have New Voices laws, Minnesota being the most recent state to pass legislation in 2025.
“With our free legal hotline, we cater to student journalists and their advisors for any sort of legal question that might come up throughout the country, all 50 states and DC,” Gaston-Falk said.
Currently, there is a lawsuit at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) but students facing censorship have already created an independent paper to replace The UTD Mercury with The Retrograde. However, this solution isn’t without its downsides.
“If we are leaving our structure that’s afforded by the university, like at Dallas, forming its own 501 (c)(3) that might diminish the case that they have against the university based on the university’s treatment,” Gaston-Falk said.
Despite ample opportunities for students to reach out for legal help and to participate in their own legislature, some students aren’t aware of the help available to them.
“When we very first started, I mean, I would say [I didn’t know] much,” Frazier said. “Are those laws that would have kind of helped maybe pertain to us in that situation?”
This isn’t the only instance of a lack of New Voices legislation harming collegiate publications. At the University of Alabama two magazines were shut down. Alice, which had an all female staff, and 1956, which had an all African American staff, both served specific demographics and were shut down due to new federal DEI policies in 2025, Al reports. On May 22, 2026, a federal court did not issue a preliminary injunction to un-suspend the publications.
“We at Student Press Law Center think that for that question of the preliminary injunction that the judge got things incorrect,” Gaston-Falk said. “I think that there was a core mistake that the judge made by conflating or confusing a couple of different standards that were involved.”
In a legal analysis, the SPLC explains that the court treated administration’s decision in the same manner as deciding what courses to offer, however these decisions are not treated the same under the first amendment. They further explain that the decision was affected by the specific forums and considered the case to be a matter of content, not viewpoint, a decision that continues to be debated. The university seemed to suspend the magazines because they only served, and were staffed by, female or African American students. But UA’s is a unique situation.
“[There is] not something so egregious, not something so extreme,” Gaston-Falk said. “That’s a part of what makes this alarming and a unique situation, because not in the entire history of the law that we have in front of us from court decisions have we gotten a judge to make this to confuse this issue in such a stark way.”
Campuses across the U.S. continue to face threats of censorship, but the SPLC continues fighting for student journalists’ rights alongside them.
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