At the end of May, I experienced a canon event that all Seattle University seniors go through: realizing that my time in school was nearly over. I’ve spent the past week frantically making sure that I’ve tied up loose ends— finishing my final projects, packing up my apartment and attending every end-of-year event I can. Part of that means closing out my time as a student journalist—this is my last story with The Spectator.
Choosing a “closing message” is hard. Should I write about what my favorite NBA team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, need to do this offseason to not get humiliated in the Western Conference Finals next year? Should I just dedicate a page to plugging our podcast, Cherry Street Chat? Should I express my disappointment in too much positive Spectator coverage of the “sport” (emphasis on the quotation marks) pickleball this year?
While these ideas sound fun, I also recognize that there are much more pressing issues that deserve attention right now. As a result, I would like to talk about the importance of student journalism and student speech for my final Spectator story.
I first saw the power of student journalism as a high school student. Going to a public school, my student newspaper was protected by First Amendment speech rights, allowing us to accurately and fairly report on any topic we could imagine. From exposing a teacher’s inappropriate messages to a former student to reporting on our principal’s expired administrative license, we uncovered stories that not even the pros were reporting on.
My experience as a high school journalist taught me the importance of the First Amendment. Without speech protections, we would have risked censorship from our school, and nobody would have known the full extent of each story. It’s because of that experience that my journalistic motto has always been to “tell the story that otherwise would not be told.”
That’s why it makes me sad to see that in 2025, our First Amendment rights might be under attack.
As I write this, there is a push for Congress to defund America’s only public-owned broadcast companies, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Since just a handful of companies own the vast majority of American media, I believe that public broadcasting is essential to make sure the people will always have a voice.
Additionally, President Donald Trump said on his campaign trail that he would consider stripping broadcast stations of their licenses for “bad coverage” and throwing journalists in jail for using anonymous sources. While these two ideas have not materialized, they reflect a growing disdain for the media in the U.S.
Free speech is at the core of American values, and a threat to the speech rights of the press is a threat to the speech rights of the people. Going forward, I think we all have to make a decision: do we want to foster and support freedom of speech, or are we alright with it being taken away from us?
This is a decision that I believe Seattle University needs to make too. As a private school, Seattle U has no legal obligation to give its students First Amendment speech protections. The university’s student media policy states that the school is “legally responsible for the content and conduct of all its publications.” With the school acting as the publisher, The Spectator could be legally subject to censorship for any content Seattle U disagrees with.
I’m not saying the university hopes or wants to censor The Spectator, but stating the fact that it has the ability to ultimately make final decisions on our publication. This is troublesome to me, because without speech protections my high school paper would have been silenced for our groundbreaking reporting—we almost went to court over a censorship attempt. Without speech protections, we wouldn’t have been able to tell the stories that otherwise would not have been told. Seattle U’s student journalists deserve equal speech protections to my high school self.
As I mentioned earlier, Seattle U is at a crossroads. Our university must decide to back our First Amendment rights, or stay on the path that is threatening the news industry and free speech as a whole.
A just and humane world is only maintained when there is someone to stand up to corruption and the abuse of power. I don’t plan on sitting anytime soon.
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To our avid Spectator readers, Cherry Street Chat enjoyers, and anyone else who has taken the time to read this, I want to say thank you for choosing to stay informed. It has been my pleasure to report for you and learn about your amazing stories. If you’d like to follow my journalism work post-graduation, feel free to follow my reporter Instagram account @calebstipkovits_tv.
