A newspaper's quality and content are legally and logically inseparable, particularly when KSU officials say that they fired the adviser due to the results of a content analysis.

As college student media hold their collective breaths while the U.S. Supreme Court debates what, if anything, it should do with Hosty v. Carter, the much-heralded censorship case out of Governors State University in Illinois, another case has crept out of the midwest that could - if allowed to stand - deliver a second, serious body blow to press freedom on American public college and university campuses.

The U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals is expected to decide early next year whether public college officials can fire a student media adviser if they decide that the publication's "quality" has failed to meet their expectations.

The case, Lane v. Simon, began when student editors of the Kansas State Collegian, Katie Lane and Sarah Rice, along with newspaper adviser Ron Johnson, sued university officials last year after officials removed Johnson from his position based on a "content analysis" of the publication conducted by head of the journalism school.

That analysis, which has been criticized by professional journalism educators around the country, consisted in part of counting the number of stories on particular topics. It concluded that the paper's news coverage was lacking, specifically as it related to issues concerning "diversity."

The issue of diversity in the newspaper had become controversial after the Collegian did not report on the Big 12 Diversity Leadership Conference, a multi-cultural event on campus, something the editors admitted was a mistake and later apologized for.

The university presented no evidence at trial that the adviser played a role in discouraging coverage of such issues, and in fact noted that under university policy the adviser had no control whatsoever over the content of the paper.

Nevertheless, in June 2005, a federal district court held that the university's content analysis and the adviser's subsequent dismissal did not violate the student editors' First Amendment rights, because the analysis and removal were somehow related only to the paper's "quality" and not its content.

Such a rationale is, of course, absurd. A newspaper's quality and content are legally and logically inseparable, particularly in this case where KSU officials expressly stated that they fired the adviser due to the results of a "content analysis" of the student paper, which itself was prompted by student and faculty protests against the Collegian's charged failure to cover certain campus events.

The students appealed the district court's decision and this month an alliance of nine organizations representing student and commercial journalists - including the Student Press Law Center and the Associated Collegiate Press - and a civil rights group filed a friend of the court brief urging the appeals court to reject the lower court's reasoning.

As the coalition pointed out, the court's decision was, in effect, an end-around more than three decades of law that says student editors - not public college administrators - are responsible for determining what's in the student newspaper. But because school officials couldn't directly censor the newspaper or insist that student editors cover only the news they wanted, administrators chose another path: they canned the Collegian's 15-year adviser because of the paper's poor "overall quality" (the court's words, not mine).

That, of course, begs the question how do you defend against the vague charge that your newspaper's "overall quality" is poor? School officials with a vested interest in promoting the school's image should hardly be trusted to make such evaluations. Certainly, for example, one must wonder if the quality meter at KSU was out of whack since less than three months before their adviser was fired, College Media Advisers named the Collegian the best four-year daily broadsheet newspaper in the country at the group's national convention, the latest in a long string of journalism awards the newspaper had received.

The chilling effect on student media from this decision, if the appeals court allows it to stand, is obvious. Student journalists, particularly those with close, working relationships with their advisers, will find themselves in no-win situations: do they publish the news that will keep their school administrators happy or do they publish the news they believe their readers should know - even if it means their adviser - who may be saddled with a family and a mortgage - might lose his or her job? Some advisers, too, are likely to start exerting more pressure on their student staff to cover news they know their bosses want to read.

These are clearly different - and dark - days for America's college student media. Between Hosty and Lane, student journalists are now engaged in a fight that could drastically change the face of free speech on campus. Judges today have upheld attacks on the First Amendment that would have been all but laughed out of court by judges 20 years ago. While the fight is not over for student journalists, the laughing sure is.

Mike Hiestand is an attorney, based in the far, upper left corner of the "Lower 48," and works as a legal consultant to the Student Press Law Center.