Former director of student media Jim Rodenbush is suing Indiana University for wrongful termination.
The media school fired Rodenbush after he refused to pull news from a scheduled special edition of the Indiana Daily Student. That afternoon IU announced it would stop printing the paper entirely.
Rodenbush says in his complaint that the university violated his First Amendment speech rights and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights by firing him without an opportunity to be heard.
Attorney Jon Little is seeking compensation for his client as well as injunctive relief, that the university rehire Rodenbush and clear his disciplinary record.
But he doesn’t think that’ll happen.
“So we'll go to court and we'll pretend like there's some kind of justice here,” Little said. “Like we'll pretend that IU even cares what a court says. 'Cause they don't.”
Little is no stranger to IU. In addition to attending the university, he’s faced it before in court.
“Maybe they lose and they pay Jim money,” Little said. “But at the end of the day, IU is not giving him his job back. And the IDS is never coming back.”
The complaint said Rodenbush’s superiors directed him to remove news from the upcoming print homecoming edition of the IDS.
Little argues IU made that decision in response to specific content that would have been printed in the homecoming special edition: a story on Indiana utilities’ climate backtracking and one on a documentary criticizing the IU administration.
Ordinarily, nobody outside of the newspaper staff would see a story before it was published. But Little said it’s possible the IU administration and governor’s office had foreknowledge.
“That's what discovery's for,” he said. “We're gonna get Pam Whitten under oath. We're gonna get somebody from the governor's office under oath. We're gonna find out who knew what and when.”
IU has not commented on firing Rodenbush, saying it won’t comment on personnel matters. But his termination letter refers to a “lack of leadership and ability to work in alignment with the University’s direction for the Student Media Plan.”
For its part, the university publicly affirmed the paper’s independence and says the decision to cut print was both a prudent financial decision and an overdue step toward preparing students for the “digital-first media careers of the future.”
The IDS maintains that this year’s print issues netted an $11,000 profit.
IU hasn’t commented on the mandate to pull news from the special print edition. A memo sent Monday from the provost to the chancellor’s office, provided to WFIU/WTIU News by a source requesting anonymity as a condition, said that the student media plan “does not explicitly define the ‘special editions.’”
Little is confident in his case, but not the system it will be tried in.
“The relief for this is not coming in court. The relief for this is the students and faculty at IU get some of their dignity and self-respect back and strike,” Little said.
The IDS has been printed for 158 years and still publishes news online.
