Fired student newspaper adviser claims free speech violation in federal lawsuit

A faculty adviser for Indiana University’s student newspaper filed a federal lawsuit Thursday arguing his free speech and due process rights were violated when he was fired for refusing to ensure no news stories appeared in the homecoming print edition earlier this month.

A lawyer for the adviser, Jim Rodenbush, said it’s a case seeking “to have a court state that the First Amendment still matters.”

Rodenbush, in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, seeks reinstatement to his job and monetary damages. He was dismissed Oct. 14 for his “lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the university’s direction for the Student Media Plan,” according to David Tolchinsky, dean of the university’s media school, who also ended the newspaper’s print product.

“The question is if a university doesn’t like the content of the student newspaper, can it simply pull the plug on the student newspaper,” Rodenbush’s attorney, Jonathan Little, said.

Phone and email messages were left for university spokespersons. The school issued a statement earlier this month saying it was shifting publication from print to digital platforms for educational and financial purposes.

Editors of the Indiana Daily Student announced Thursday that the university backtracked on its decision to cut future print editions for the rest of the school year. Chancellor David Reingold authorized the paper to use its established printing budget through June 30, 2026. The next issue is scheduled to print Nov. 20.

Reingold said Thursday in a letter to the editors of the student paper that he recognizes the university “has not handled recent decisions as well as we should have.”

The chancellor noted that the “personnel matter” and the budget-related decision to pause printing fueled a perception that the school was trying to censor editorial content. He reminded editors that the paper is “not immune to the financial realities of this campus.”

“Let me be clear: my decision had nothing to do with editorial content of the IDS,” Reingold said. “And contrary to what has been posted on social media and published, Indiana University has never attempted to censor editorial content, period.”

In their own letter Thursday, student editors Mia Hilkowitz and Andrew Miller disagreed with the chancellor, saying the administration’s actions constituted censorship.

Subsidized by $250,000 a year because of dwindling ad revenue, the Indiana Daily Student, regularly honored as among the nation’s best collegiate news organizations, had its weekly print editions reduced to seven special sections a year. Rodenbush said this fall, administrators questioned why the special sections still had hard news content.

“Telling student journalists what they can and cannot include in a newspaper is censorship of ‘editorial content’ by any definition,” wrote Hilkowitz and Miller.

Rodenbush told Tolchinsky editorial decisions belonged to the student staff alone before Tolchinsky fired him and terminated future print editions.

The dismissal came days before the scheduled publication of the paper’s homecoming edition, which would have greeted tens of thousands of alumni returning to Bloomington to celebrate the undefeated Hoosiers football team, currently ranked No. 2 nationally.

“In a direct assault on the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment, IU fired James Rodenbush when he refused the directive to censor student work in the campus newspaper and print only fluff pieces about the upcoming homecoming festivities,” the complaint reads.