Judge Flags Firing : Harbor College Editor Who Met With Klansman Wins Reinstatement

A federal judge Friday angrily ordered that Joe Fields, fired opinion page editor of Harbor College’s student newspaper, be reinstated to the job he lost 10 weeks ago for associating with a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

“Don’t you people have any concern for freedom of the press or freedom of association?” U.S. District Judge James M. Ideman asked attorneys defending the dismissal of the 20-year-old Fields.

“We will not have this in this country. I suggest you check to see if the American flag is flying outside this courthouse,” the judge told Conrad Kohrs, the lawyer for Joe Granberg, the student editor-in-chief who fired Fields Feb. 5 after Fields met on campus with former Klan leader Tom Metzger.

Fields, who was represented by Gary Williams of the American Civil Liberties Union, said after the court session: “I am delighted with the ruling and feel lucky to get a judge who takes the Constitution seriously.”

Fields has been the center of controversy for most of the school year because of a series of articles he wrote describing the Jewish Holocaust as a “myth.” Publication of those articles in the Harbor Hawk brought a censure last semester to the student newspaper from the Los Angeles Community College board of trustees.

Ironically, it was Granberg, 21, who was one of the staunchest supporters of Fields’ right to publish those articles when the controversy reached its peak last December.

Kohrs, arguing on Granberg’s behalf Friday, said that the newspaper’s own rules and regulations voted on by the staff give the editor-in-chief “absolute leadership and authority” over the newspaper staff.

The judge responded, “But that doesn’t give Mr. Granberg the untrammeled right to violate Mr. Fields’ constitutional rights by firing him for the sole reason that he associated with someone the editor-in-chief doesn’t approve of.”

The judge also was harshly critical of Michael Cornner, faculty adviser to the newspaper, for his role in handling the matter. The judge read from a memorandum written by Cornner in which he recommended that Fields’ appeal of his firing be “summarily denied without a hearing . . . so you can save yourself the time, the embarrassment and the trouble and not feed his already overblown ego.”

“That is a rather shocking thing to hear from a teacher,” Ideman said.

Outside the courtroom, Cornner said his goal as an adviser to the newspaper was to “instill professional standards and journalistic responsibility.” He and Granberg said they felt Fields’ meeting with Metzger and the distributing of “revisionist” literature on the Holocaust “denigrated our newspaper.”

Mary Dowell, an attorney representing the college and Cornner, asked that Ideman hold off issuing a preliminary injunction reinstating Fields until “all of his administrative remedies are exhausted.”

She pointed out that the hearing on Fields’ appeal of his dismissal is scheduled to be heard Monday by a panel of staff members from the student newspaper. If he should lose that appeal, under school rules, he could have the case reviewed by a panel of professional journalists from the community.

Cites ‘Ugly Atmosphere’

Dowell also argued that the other student members of the newspaper staff “have some rights, too, including not to have to suffer the disruption caused . . . by the ugly and angry atmosphere generated by this young man.”

But Ideman issued the preliminary injunction and ordered that he be given a progress report on the appeal process by April 26. In issuing the order, he said:

“They already have delayed this appeal for a long time, I think, because they hoped it would somehow die and the semester would end. I can’t understand what is going on down there. One of the values of college is that it is supposed to expose students to a variety of thought to the left and the right. They should not have a safety blanket or be put in a cocoon to protect them from controversy.”