School Paper Issues Canceled Amid Feud : Valley College: Dispute heightens between faculty advisor, student staff. Semester’s final two editions are not published.

The final two issues of the weekly student newspaper at Valley College this semester have been canceled amid a dispute between the staff and its new faculty advisor that included the advisor summoning campus police to remove students from her classroom.

School administrators say they cannot recall any comparable lapse in the history of the newspaper.

The Valley Star edition scheduled for Thursday of last week was canceled by faculty advisor Joan Stuller, and the scheduled last paper of the semester this Thursday also will not be published, administrators said.

The paper’s student editor on Monday accused Stuller of interfering in students’ management of the publication, and he and other students questioned her calling campus police at least twice during the semester to remove students from the classroom. Editor Shawn Bush also questioned Stuller’s qualifications, saying she was “clearly unable to handle” the job.

In an interview, Stuller did not deny calling campus police, although she declined to elaborate on her reasons, saying she is required by law to protect the privacy of the students involved.

But she did deny the students’ other allegations, saying some are resisting her efforts to reform the paper. “There’s a conspiracy here,” she said.

“This has been an unusual semester at the Star,” conceded Richard Moyer, the interim academic affairs vice president at the two-year community college, which has more than 15,000 students. “In my many years in community colleges, I don’t think I have ever heard a set of circumstances quite as complicated as what’s happening here.”

He said he thought some of the newspaper’s student staff are preparing a lawsuit over Stuller’s actions.

The latest blowup in what students said has been a semester-long series of problems came last Wednesday, the day before the paper’s scheduled publication, when Bush was late arriving on campus, because of a medical appointment, he said.

Over Bush’s protests, students said, Stuller canceled publication of the paper, saying there was not enough time to prepare it.

Bush accused Stuller of usurping his job by killing one story, assigning another story to a writer, keeping the paper to a smaller size than in the past with mostly four-page editions this semester, and of calling the campus police twice to escort students out of her newspaper class without cause.

“I just laughed at her, it sounded so ludicrous,” Bush said of the dispute last Wednesday over the paper’s cancellation.

“I’m surprised we got 10 issues done this semester as it is. It’s been chaos from before Day 1,” he said, adding that Stuller also ordered some students out of the journalism building following the cancellation, again threatening to call the police.

Stuller said she did so because three students unhappy over the decision not to publish were refusing to leave while she was trying to teach another class. But she denied ever killing a story or making assignments that are the province of student editors. She said funding limits were responsible for the four-page papers.

And she said some students were just resisting her changes.

“Every time I try to put in a new rule, students are coming and saying that’s not the way we do it here. Whenever you’re sweeping out the old and bringing in the new, there’s a lot of resistance,” said Stuller. She previously has taught communication classes and worked as an unpaid assistant for news organizations, but has never held a paid job in journalism.