Current Pennsylvania Governor and UR alumnus Josh Shapiro’s name was one of the few circulating as a potential candidate for vice president in the 2024 election cycle. His candidacy ended, at least in part, due to backlash from an opinion article he wrote for the Campus Times during his time as a student three decades ago. In that opinion he argued that Palestine could not coexist peacefully with Israel, and, when the article began to circulate online, he quickly faced backlash from both voters and the media. In the age of the Internet, what happened to Shapiro is what children are often warned about starting as early as elementary school: Don’t put anything on the Internet that you don’t want following you forever. Armed with that knowledge, our present-day writers, when fearing future backlash, will at times reach out to us when they want an article taken down, or interview comments anonymized. As the world’s political climate grows more polarizing, we have started to receive more and more requests to have articles, often opinion articles, taken down or privatized.
As a student-run club and a significant part of the University, the Campus Times’ number one priority is ensuring the safety and success of staff members, student contributors, and community members in general. This means that sometimes we do privatize articles — usually if the author is concerned for their safety or another’s. Whether due to the fears about Immigration and Customs Enforcement spreading through the University or something else, the CT has received an increasing number of requests to either remove or anonymize articles and remove names from quotes. These requests from writers are sometimes laced with the fear of revocation of their VISAs and status, even if the articles are of benign content.
Our regulations for privatizing articles align with our policies on source anonymization: If it’s deemed that publication may endanger the author, whether to retaliation, risk of verbal or physical threat, or fear of national level surveillance (such as the potential revocation of a VISA), the article will be removed.
Other articles — such as a scathing album review or minor campus news coverage — are not subject to the same allowance. If an author reaches out to request privatization without providing a reason, or providing a reason that does not meet our standards for anonymity, the decision of whether to privatize the article or not is finalized by the current Editor-in-Chief.
The reasoning for these strict conditions on what can be removed from our archives aligns with both the CT’s responsibility to maintain integrity in journalism as well as an author’s responsibility to understand the weight of releasing their work to a public audience. For printed articles, a piece has been submitted, edited, and brought to the presses, there’s no way for us to magically remove its text from our papers — nor to prevent our audiences from reading it at any point in the future. In the case of an error, we provide an editor’s notes in future editions. But if an author simply regrets their previous decision to publish, there’s not much we can do.
In the case of articles that were only published online, we have the ability to make quick revisions or erase the body from our website entirely, but having the ability to do something does not mean we should always use it. Our articles are more than simple student products — they are historical archives that represent the perspective of students regarding community relevant topics throughout time. Preserving articles as they were published, even if the viewpoint of the author has changed in the months or years following publication, allows the Campus Times to maintain a body of diverse perspectives in our work, solidifying community voices in the cultural and political zeitgeists of their time. If applicable, we encourage authors who may wish to privatize their work because of a change in opinion to write a follow-up article, showcasing their voice and development of opinion rather than attempting to erase the past.
While we sympathize with students who want their work taken down, we have decided to apply the same standards as anonymity for sources in our articles. We respect all of our writers, and the safety of our writers is of the utmost importance, but if that isn’t at stake, then we have a responsibility to provide our readers with the facts — and that includes keeping articles and names online.
