Freedom of Speech Suit Won by Teacher : Courts: The fired publisher of Cal State L.A.’s student newspaper, who has since died, said the school tried to muzzle its investigations.

Five months after her death, a Cal State Los Angeles journalism instructor on Monday won a freedom-of-speech lawsuit over her firing as publisher of the campus newspaper.

A Superior Court jury voted 10 to 2 to award $22,983 in damages to the parents of Joan Zyda, who died last August, three years after filing the suit.

“The jury sent a clear message that her 1st Amendment rights had been violated,” said her attorney, Robert C. Moest, after the verdict was read.

“They fired her because she made the newspaper too good,” he said. “She encouraged her students to do a hard-nosed investigative report that uncovered negligence (by the university) that led to the death of a student.”

Deputy Atty. Gen. Laura Lee Gold, who represented the state in the trial, said she was not sure if the case would be appealed.

Campus officials, in testimony, insisted that Zyda had been fired for what they alleged was her difficult personality, not in any attempt to censor news.

“It was not predicated on the content of the newspaper, but rather on her conduct as an employee,” Gold said. She said Zyda had resisted needed budget cuts and had caused divisions among student reporters and editors.

Zyda was publisher of the campus paper, the University Times, when it investigated the death of a young woman killed Oct 1, 1987, when a concrete slab from a parking structure fell on her during the Whittier earthquake.

The paper said it learned that another slab had toppled before the earthquake, indicating possible structural flaws, but that the university apparently had done nothing to correct the problem.

The paper also ran stories accusing the school’s administration of an attempt to muzzle it and criticizing the way the university development office was handling gifts made to the school.

In March, 1988, the university removed Zyda as a journalism instructor. A few weeks later, the school fired her, saying her removal “would better meet the educational goals of the university.”

In March, 1989, Zyda filed her suit, saying she wanted “to put a strong light on the 1st Amendment house of horrors” at the Los Angeles campus. She claimed that her rights to freedom of expression had been violated by university administrators demanding more upbeat stories in the paper.

Large parts of Zyda’s case had been dismissed by Superior Court Judge Richard Hubbell. Among those were emotional distress claims, alleged federal freedom-of-speech violations and complaints against five campus officials, including Cal State L. A. President James Rosser.

The jury awarded Zyda’s parents, Joseph and Teresa Zyda of Las Vegas, $12,938 in back pay and $10,000 for violation of her rights to free speech.

Zyda was working as a senior journalism instructor at UCLA Extension and as a public information specialist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena when she suffered a brain hemorrhage last July. Zyda, 40, was pronounced dead Aug. 1.

Her brother, Christopher, named executor of her estate, decided to continue the suit, and the trial began last week.

“Of course we are all very happy that Joan was vindicated and Cal State L.A. was held accountable for what they did,” Christopher Zyda said Monday. “The important thing is she won and she can now rest in peace.”