In mid-August we received an email from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer requesting an advertisement to be placed in our paper. After much discussion, we ultimately decided not to respond to the request, leaving the advertisement unpublished and our board unsure as to what exactly they intended to advertise. This experience has raised several important questions that interrogate our responsibility as a newspaper to consider the political climate and our own commitment to diversity within our student body. In recent months, federal policies impacted diversity at the University — especially regarding changes in student visa regulations — but still, UR prides itself on its substantial community of international students, who made up around 30% of the student body during the Fall 2024 term.
Although the Campus Times is partially funded by the University, the paper gains a significant source of revenue from external funding in the form of advertising. The majority of the advertisements run are for local businesses or on-campus events, which don’t require much consideration. But what happens when a potential advertisement comes into conflict with the CT’s principles or our students’ safety? We affirm that we cannot responsibly serve our audience while acting as a mouthpiece for something that has the potential to cause our readers harm. Given the current political environment, we agreed that an advertisement for U.S. Customs and Border Protection has such potential.
We believe that this holds true for newspapers at large. Running an advertisement paid for by a political institution is an implicit endorsement of the institution’s message. In other words, although an individual writer giving their opinion solely reflects the views of that writer, running a partisan advertisement communicates that the Campus Times is supportive of those politics. This inherently goes against the journalistic ideal of neutrality that a campus newspaper should embody. Our goal is to represent a position of openness — one that welcomes the contributions of all writers regardless of political orientation.
We welcome all opinions from writers, but that welcome does not come without expectations. In order to be published, an article’s sources, language, and word choice need to be considered. More than just the components of an article, we must attempt to bring in articles from multiple sides of each issue to maintain balance. This impacts the manner in which content is framed within the paper, which in turn is further shaped by the wide range of sources across varying perspectives.
Editors can and do work with student writers to provide accurate, grounded facts to contextualize their articles, but our advertising policy does not afford our advertisers the same luxury. For institutionally-backed organizations with strong political connotations, such as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the lack of context in advertisements has the potential to cause fear and discomfort in the campus community.
This fear is both justified and already evidenced — this April, five UR students and six recent graduates had their student visas revoked under federal immigrant enforcement. In August, the Department of Homeland Security published a proposed ruling that would limit international students to fixed periods of entry to the U.S., removing the “duration of status” rulings that permitted individuals to maintain nonimmigrant student status while completing their degree. Limiting programs to a four-year period of study stifles the academic opportunity provided to international students at both an undergraduate and graduate level.
We did not respond to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s advertisement outreach, and we will likely never know the specific message of their intended advertisement — however, whether the organization intended to advertise careers (as seen through pizza boxes given to restaurants with the goal of recruitment) or any other topic, publishing this advertisement would only have served to further unrest within the university community.
The federal actions noted above, as well as many more regarding immigration and border security, discredit the profound influence of immigrants and international students on the culture, livelihood, and longevity of the University campus and beyond. As a newspaper representing and standing for the student body, we reject any and all actions and inactions that may further an agenda of exclusion in any capacity. Our mission is, and always will be, to serve our campus community.
The Editorial Board is an Opinions article representing the view of the Campus Times, co-written by Editor-in-Chief Natalie Opdahl; Publisher Sherene Yang; Managing Editors Alex Holly, Maya Brosnick, and Helena Feng; Opinions Editors Eva Naik and Addison Baker; and Editor-at-Large Aeneas Wolf.
