Stanford Writer Fired Over Column on Chelsea Clinton

A Stanford Daily columnist lost his job after writing about Chelsea Clinton in violation of the student paper’s policy to ignore the “First Freshman” unless she does something newsworthy.

Jesse Oxfeld wrote an opinion column questioning the university’s policy of treating the president’s daughter like any other freshman when her parents turned opening day into a circus of TV cameras, Secret Service agents and police dogs.

“First, why, precisely, is it that we’re all expected to bend over backward to give Chelsea and her family a ‘normal’ Stanford experience,” he wrote, “while the first family itself is under no similar obligation?”

Oxfeld, a senior majoring in communications, described the Daily’s policy as “Clintonian,” saying it amounts to “don’t ask (anything about her life), don’t tell (anyone outside the campus what you might happen to discover about her life), don’t pursue (her at all).”

Stanford Daily Editor in Chief Carolyn Sleeth issued a statement Tuesday explaining that Oxfeld’s column, which had been scheduled to run last Friday, violated the limitations she laid down on covering Clinton. Sleeth said she killed the column after Oxfeld refused to revise it, then told him he would no longer be a columnist this semester.

Oxfeld, the paper’s former managing editor, said Wednesday that he supports the paper’s limits on covering Clinton so that the Daily’s reporters “are not abusing our status as students to gain access and file National Enquirer-style pieces on the party she went to and whom she’s dating.”

But he said Sleeth has taken the policy too far, especially in censoring an opinion page column. “This was an excuse to fire me,” he said, adding that he and Sleeth have clashed over her insistence that staffers not freelance helping outside media cover Clinton.

Sleeth was unavailable for comment Wednesday. But in her statement, she said that Oxfeld represented the Daily as a paid staff columnist and thus was covered by its policies. She also noted that Oxfeld’s “violation was the culmination of a series of work-related issues.”