Spencer Thomas | editor-in-chief

In the early hours of a chilly morning in February 1989, Sean McNamara’s rusty 1978 Pontiac LeMans station wagon hobbled down the roads of Western Pennsylvania. He and his passengers drove from Duquesne to Indiana, Pa., to Washington Pa., and back to campus again.

There, a crowd of students and media awaited the Pontiac’s cargo: a protest paper. There wasn’t supposed to be a publication that week because the Student Government Association had shut The Duquesne Duke down.

That all-night odyssey was just one step in a months-long crisis between The Duke and SGA that fundamentally changed the campus newspaper forever by establishing a publication board.

How this story started differs, depending on the individual’s perspective.

Some say it started, just hours after George H.W. Bush was inaugurated as the 41st President of the United States, when The Duke ran a black-and-white ad across three columns advertising “Family Health Council” and its contraceptive counseling services.

Others say it began months earlier when a bank account, operated by The Duke staff outside of the university’s control, was discovered.

Still others contend it was a result of a long-standing feud between the campus newspaper staff and SGA’s efforts to silence the campus newspaper.

To Jamie Sawa, then Academic Vice President of SGA, it started when the organization discovered a “hidden” account with Mellon Bank that The Duke used to store its advertising revenue. It was completely independent of the university, which Sawa said SGA was told could be a problem because it jeopardized the university’s 501(c)(3) tax status, which exempts educational institutions.

Sawa said that he, SGA President Harold “Happy” Meltzer and the rest of SGA leadership mobilized, and quietly began investigating the account. Each member had their own responsibility, and on top of their academic duties, essentially formed their own investigation agency.

At the time, The Duke was funded by SGA. Nevertheless, Duquesne’s administration charged student leaders with monitoring and enforcing fellow students involved in campus organizations.

“They basically said it was a student matter,” Sawa said, “and because student government funded The Duke, they weren’t going to interfere unless they felt there was some reason that the students’ rights were being infringed upon, but they really were hands off.”

SGA undertook that responsibility and froze the account. Sawa recalls staying up all night with his colleagues, parsing through receipts associated with the account.

In the meantime, Meltzer and Sawa were having frank conversations with The Duke’s Editor-In-Chief Rebecca Drumm about the “Family Health Council” ad. They said it was incompatible with the school’s Catholic values. Newspaper staff said it was the newspaper’s prerogative to accept advertising dollars from businesses and organizations to help support the publication.

Prior to The Duke publishing the advertisement, Sawa recalls that they found proof Drumm used the Mellon Bank account on non-business expenses, such as furnishing her apartment and buying a class ring. Her Duke colleagues said that was just a bogus excuse. Drumm declined to comment for this story.

The next week, The Duke ran the ad again, this time alongside an article by Drumm titled “Censorship on The Bluff?” Three decades later, her newspaper colleagues believe that The Duke’s frequent coverage of administrative controversies earned her a reputation as a “rabblerouser.”

SGA responded on Feb. 13, 1989, saying in a letter archived by The Duke it would be forced to “examine the operation of our student newspaper.”

All this time later, former Duke staffers recall SGA’s attempts to control what they called “our” publication. In some SGA communications at the time, the word was even underlined.

Behavior like that in their letters seems to inform The Duke staff’s view of the controversy.

To them, Happy Meltzer didn’t like the way he was covered in the campus paper, and took every excuse to go after it. To the paper staff, this was a free speech issue, where an overstepping government was trying to control its watchdog.

“Happy was a very complex person,” Sawa said, adding that Meltzer was passionate and intelligent, but would find himself at odds with his own student senate. Occasionally, he found himself unhappy with an article in The Duke.

“If it wasn’t presented in the way that he felt he presented it, they wrote it a different way, I think he felt like they intentionally slighted him,” Sawa added.

Meanwhile, the offending ad kept appearing. Meltzer had had enough.

DOWN GOES THE DUKE

On Sunday, Feb. 12, 1989, McNamara, the news editor, tried to get into the newsroom, and discovered that a locksmith had changed the locks. SGA had unanimously voted to shut the paper down.

Even now, former Duke editors blame SGA leadership for the move.

“Happy was really the catalyst for it. He hadn’t liked the interview that appeared with him previously,” McNamara said.

He argued that everything after Meltzer’s displeasure was a kangaroo court, hellbent on pinning something on The Duke.

“As this morphed, they decided to do an investigation into financial stuff with the paper. There was no financial weirdness,” he said. “It was simply using paper funds to pay for the operations of the newspaper. But they tried to warp it into something different to justify closing down a newspaper.”

Sawa contended that the severity of the account problem justified drastic measures.

“We felt at the time that the charges were so serious that we needed to stop everything to give us time to investigate,” he said.

Sawa felt like SGA was stuck between a rock and a hard place: The investigation was independent of the contraceptive counseling ad, and he rejected the notion that the two were connected.

“That wasn’t what happened. That was a convenient answer. We were a victim of bad timing on that,” Sawa said.

Production Manager Dennis Callaghan, meanwhile, maintains that the core of the conflict centered around free speech.

“Ultimately it was [about free speech]. I mean, in that (Feb. 13) letter, they literally threatened us with ‘we’re going to take a look at your books, the way you run, unless you pull this ad,” Callaghan said. “I always wonder, what would have happened if we decided to listen to them and pull the ad.”

It was only then, Feb. 15, when an impromptu editorial board meeting led the staff to pile into the Pontiac and set course for Indiana University of Pennsylvania. There, the student newspaper The Penn, had offered up their facilities for typesetting. Drumm’s account the next day describes leaving campus around 6:30 p.m. They worked overnight on a shortened, four-page issue of their protest paper, which they called The Free Press, before looping to Washington to get it printed at the Washington Observer-Reporter.

The Pontiac didn’t make it through the journey unscathed. What it gained in mileage, it lost in a spare. McNamara says that after already losing the main story on a computer, his vehicle got a flat tire, slowing them down even more. Parked, trying to fix the car, the staff joked that it was part of a conspiracy to stop the publication from reaching the student body.

By the time the staff got back to campus, it was late afternoon Feb. 16. They hadn’t slept in a day and a half, but their audience waited for their side of the story. Callaghan was shocked to see the interest the controversy had generated on campus, including members from the local press such as KDKA and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“I never even thought that many people were paying attention to us when we were The Duke,” he said. “But it was quite a commotion.”

McNamara called his parents, and gave them the scoop early, just in case they saw him on the news. Staff Manager Patty Groening (Jaconette), a commuter student, fielded interview requests through her mom.

Other stories in The Free Press describe support from several other local publications, as well as the Student Senate at Carnegie Mellon University. McNamara thought that the media firestorm influenced the paper’s quick reinstatement by forcing cooler heads to prevail.

“I think everyone started to realize that if you have a journalism department as part of your college, you can’t then curtail journalism,” he said.

But when the paper was brought back, Drumm was not. She was suspended, charged with several counts by SGA: “misuse of university documents, tampering with her election, attempted or actual theft of property of the university, failure to comply with directions of university officials and violation of published university policies, rules or regulations.” On March 13, 1989, after an all-day hearing in front of the judiciary board, Drumm was cleared of the tampering, theft and misuse charges, but pinned for the others. She was placed on probation, and for her last several months at Duquesne, she was barred from all extracurricular activities, including The Duke. Details of the hearing remain unknown.

In a statement to The Duke, Duquesne Vice President of Communications Gabriel Welsch said that university judiciary records are confidential.

Drumm appealed the judicial finding, and prior to the hearing, wrote a letter asking the Rev. Father Sean Hogan, the Vice President for Student Life, to remove her suspension.

Drumm’s former classmates say she took the fall.

“To justify this whole mess, they had to find something. And so, they found her one thing,” McNamara said.

MAKING A CHANGE

On Feb. 15, 1989, representatives from each organization presented their arguments to university faculty. Unlike the administration, the faculty present took a firm stance on the conflict. The report filed after the meeting deemed The Duke and SGA as being in a “pragmatic paradox,” saying it was impossible for The Duke to fairly cover the organization that was responsible for funding them, nor was SGA capable of governing an organization that also served as their watchdog.

It is a conundrum that Aimee Edmondson, a professor in media law and journalism history at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, said what Duquesne’s students dealt with in 1989 wasn’t uncommon at all, and that the key was transparency.

“It sounds like there’d been enough friction and drama and maybe even controversy there that they do need to be pulled away from each other.”

Seeds had already been planted, when the Department of Communication had recommended restructuring The Duke’s power structure on three separate occasions, but it was that day that the adults in the room realized it had to happen ASAP. The report outlined the setup The Duke exists under today; A publications board of students, faculty, administration and even outside media professionals that would become the governing body of The Duke. The core of these changes was outlined in the final report.

“It must be made clear that a newspaper is not simply a “student organization”; it is substantively different from the typical student organization because of its mission,” faculty meeting minutes stated.

Finally, The Duke and SGA were getting their long-awaited divorce. The Duke was no longer funded by the student government like most extra-curricular activities are, and SGA no longer had to be the muscle in managing the publication. Now six publications from broadcast to a scientific journal are governed by the board.

One member of the board back then remains, Duquesne Journalism Professor Maggie Patterson. She remembers examining models from other schools, befor
coming to the conclusion that the current model was the best.

“I think it’s worked really well. I think the quality of the publications is a testament to how it worked,” she said.

36 YEARS LATER

Thirty-six years ago this month, college students went to battle, and both sides freely admit it was–and still is–one of the most dramatic and important experiences of their life. Now in their mid-fifties, they passionately defend their actions like they happened yesterday.

“I learned more from this controversy about being a journalist than I ever did in a journalism class. And I guess that’s what’s supposed to happen,” McNamara said.

Despite McNamara’s angst, Groening says that he rose to the situation, and became the staff spokesperson. He never left the journalism world and is now the news director at a Fox and CW affiliate in Colorado.

Sawa has worked in business and human resources.

“In my career, I have rarely experienced any work situation that was as meaningful as in a fight kind of way as that whole episode,” he said.

However, nobody came away from this battle unscathed. It’s something that those involved on both sides look back on with a bitter taste in their mouths.

Both McNamara and Callaghan recall steep drops in their grades that semester as their headfirst slide into controversy pulled them out of the classroom. McNamara was so perturbed by it all he felt like he couldn’t stay on The Bluff. He left the university over the summer.

“[The school] said ‘come here to be a journalist,’ and then to allow government to control the press, to censor the press, was really tough for me,” he said.

“He wasn’t the only one to think of it, believe me,” Callaghan said.

Groening says the stress from the situation took a toll on her too, especially as a first-generation college student.

“It’s an experience we can always talk about forever, but did I really need to have that happen? I don’t think so. I think the whole thing could have been handled a lot better than it was,” Callaghan said.

Relationships between the two parties, who ultimately were classmates, had frayed. Sawa called that period “difficult on a personal level.” He regrets the way it went down, and with hindsight, said he would have rather seen the paper continue while the investigation into Drumm played out.

“We did the best we could with all the information we had, knowing that people were going to conflate the two issues,” he said.

After the event, The Duke continued to cover SGA as before, albeit like a headless horseman as Drumm remained in exile. She was scorned, as were the remaining staff. In later editions of the paper, when discussing the charges she was convicted of, they referred to ““alleged”” misuse of funds. However, that was the extent of her relationship with the staff.

“I know it was a black mark on Rebecca Drumm’s life and career and I’m sorry for her, that that happened,” Sawa said.

Callaghan, McNamara and Groening maintain lifelong friendships, still seeing each other whenever one is in town. Drumm has not spoken with them since that spring. She still works in journalism today in the Greater Pittsburgh area.

Her last story came that night in February, when the Pontiac brought The Free Press and its staff to campus.

“Certainly, we were kind of bound together by that experience,” Callaghan said. “But you know what? I would’ve been OK with skipping the whole thing.”