Publisher of Cal State L.A. Paper Fired

The publisher of Cal State L.A.’s student newspaper, after a series of battles with university administrators over press freedom, has been fired.

Joan Zyda, a former newspaper reporter and editor, reacted angrily to her abrupt dismissal, accusing the university’s administrators Thursday of having a “high school mentality” toward college journalism in their attempts to discourage negative reporting about campus activities.

In a campus news conference, Zyda, sporting a red “Save the University Times” sticker, said her firing, announced Wednesday and effective April 19, was a form of “harassment” of her and the newspaper, which recently won five statewide awards for excellence in college journalism.

Ruth Goldway, the university’s public affairs director, said the university would not comment on Zyda’s dismissal because it was “solely a personnel matter.”

Received Letter

A letter Zyda received Wednesday stated that she was being “rejected during probation” from the position she has held since September and that her firing would “better meet the educational goals of the university.”

Zyda, who vowed to fight for reinstatement through the university’s faculty union, was paid more than $33,000 a year to teach a newspaper production class and serve as publisher of the thrice-weekly, 8,000-circulation newspaper. Last week she had been demoted from publisher to staff adviser and was told she would not be allowed to teach.

The newspaper, produced by a staff of about 20 students, had taken an aggressive approach to news coverage under Zyda’s leadership, staff members said Thursday. They cited, in particular, stories about the Cal State L.A. student who was crushed to death when a concrete slab fell on her in the Oct. 1 earthquake.

The student’s family filed a $5-million claim against the university alleging wrongful death shortly after the publication of a University Times article suggesting that faulty construction contributed to the accident.

Based on past restrictions that had been imposed on the paper, “we were afraid as students to publish some of those stories,” said staff writer Keith Jordan, who, along with other staff members decried Zyda’s dismissal, “but Joan said we had to. The university is retaliating in a very crude and illegal way.”

Zyda, who has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, an assistant city editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and an adviser to the UCLA Daily Bruin newspaper, said top university officials have chastised her for publishing “negative news” about the school. She said that President James Rosser had tried to persuade her to provide more upbeat coverage in exchange for expanded university financial support of the paper, which has been losing money.

She said the paper has not been censored per se but that her firing amounted to “a creative, imaginative, high-tech form of censorship.”