Faculty advisor to Indiana University student newspaper He filed a federal lawsuit Thursday alleging violations of his free speech and due process rights when he was fired for refusing to ensure news stories would not appear in the print edition of Homecoming earlier this month.
The chancellor’s attorney, Jim Raudenbush, said it is a case that seeks “a ruling from the court that the First Amendment still matters.”
In a complaint filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Raudenbush seeks reinstatement and financial damages. He was fired on October 14 for his “lack of leadership and ability to work in line with the university’s direction for the student media plan,” according to David Tolchinsky, dean of the university’s School of Media, who also terminated the print newspaper.
“The question is if the university doesn’t like the content of the student newspaper, can it simply shut down the student newspaper,” Raudenbush’s attorney, Jonathan Little, said.
Phone and email messages were left for university spokesmen. The school issued a statement earlier this month saying it would shift publishing from print to digital platforms for educational and financial purposes.
The Indiana Daily Student newspaper editors announced Thursday that the university has reversed its decision to cut future print editions for the remainder of the academic year. Councilor David Ringgold authorized the newspaper to use its established printing budget until June 30, 2026. The next issue is scheduled to go to print on November 20.
Ringgold said Thursday in a letter to the editors of the student newspaper that he realizes the university “has not handled recent decisions as it should have.”
The chancellor noted that the “staff issue” and the budget decision to pause printing had fueled a perception that the school was trying to censor editorial content. He reminded editors that the newspaper “is not immune to the financial realities of this campus.”
“Let me be clear: my decision has nothing to do with the editorial content of IDS,” Reingold said. “Contrary to what has been published and disseminated on social media, Indiana University has never attempted to censor editorial content, period.”
In their own letter on Thursday, student editors Mia Helkowitz and Andrew Miller disagreed with the chancellor, saying the administration’s actions constituted censorship.
With a subsidy of $250,000 a year due to dwindling advertising revenues, the Indiana Daily Student, regularly honored as among the nation’s best syndicated news organizations, has been reduced to seven special sections a year. This fall, Raudenbush said, officials wondered why special sections still contained difficult news content.
“Telling student journalists what they can and cannot include in the newspaper amounts to censorship of ‘editorial content’ by any definition,” Helkowitz and Miller wrote.
Raudenbush told Tulchinsky that Tulchinsky’s editorial decisions belonged to the faculty alone before Tulchinsky fired him and terminated future print editions.
The dismissal came days before the scheduled publication of the Homecoming edition of the newspaper, which would have welcomed tens of thousands of alumni returning to Bloomington to celebrate National Day. The undefeated Hoosiers football teamcurrently ranked No. 2 nationally.
“In a direct assault on First Amendment rights, IU fired James Raudenbush when he refused a directive to censor student work in the campus newspaper and print only fluff articles about the upcoming Homecoming festivities,” the complaint said.
___
Associated Press writer Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.