Heroes among us

I want to encourage our students to look around at the HSJI faculty who are teaching you all this week and consider their heroism.

Those who work for high schools here in Indiana and all over the country are fighting an important and often thankless battle for student press freedom.

I teach college students, so I don’t much worry much about what they are “allowed” to publish. At a public university, our student journalists are protected by the same First Amendment rights as any professional journalist.

But so many times, your high school advisers and people such as Diana Hadley of IHSPA are fighting a much more uphill battle against censorship.  These teachers and advisers often get little or no support from school administrators in their efforts to promote student press freedom.

I have been amazed, since I began teaching at HSJI a few summers ago, how much persecution and struggle these educators endure to advocate on your behalf — and on the behalf of student journalists all over the nation. Members of our faculty have been fired or quit their jobs at high schools because they chose to defend their student journalists’ rights to publish important news without censorship.

So when you hear that your HSJI instructor spends the rest of his or her time advising a student publication at a high school, or working with organizations such as IHSPA, take a moment and thank that teacher. They are doing important, but thankless, work. We need more heroes like them.