Looking through back issues of “The Sun,” Southwestern College’s student run newspaper, I begin to realize what it must have felt like living in West Berlin looking over the wall.

The narrative reads like CNN during the post 9/11 Bush Administration.

Southwestern administrators, in a move that would make Orwell jealous, threatened “ramifications” if the first issue of “The Sun” was published.

In effect, the multiple national-award-winning publication, one of the few things Southwestern is doing right – and something the school should be proud of, was quashed in order to censor the information printed about administrators.

An all but dead stipulation, District Policy 6063, states that the student publication must have an established contract with a single printer that is approved by the college’s governing board.

Strange. This policy, unenforced for more than 20 years, is being invoked weeks before the college’s governing board elections; not to mention the Western Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation team due next month and the glaring discrepancies between the facts published by the student newspaper and the facts distributed by administration.

“The Sun” also faces the possibility of an oversight board that will have the ability to ratify and remove the paper’s editor-in-chief. A flagrant disregard for the United States Supreme Court ruling in Near vs. Minnesota which limited prior restraint, the legal term for censorship of communications by the government, to extremely limited circumstances.

The board would include members from many of the parties covered by the paper. The editor-in-chief would have to choose between retaining their position versus allowing truthful, pertinent, albeit controversial and critical, stories from running in the press.

The award winning publication has been covering the draconian practices of its Superintendent/President Dr. Raj K. Chopra since he started his term in 2007.

In October of last year four instructors who participated in a sanctioned on-campus rally were suspended. Two armed guards accompanied the suspensions, hand-delivered to the professors’ homes.

Chopra’s blatant intimidation tactics were dismissed as concern for the safety of the campus.

“The college [should] set as a priority fostering an environment of trust and respect for all employees and students that allows the college community to promote college stability and to work together for the good of the college,” is number eight of ten recommendations put forth by the accreditation team that put Southwestern on probation.

Chopra and his governing board have repeatedly failed to include faculty in the decision-making on campus – widening the schism throughout the campus. He and his circle of cronies have chosen consultants, sabbaticals and travel expenses to preserving class sections.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression bestowed one of their 2010 “Jefferson Muzzle” awards to the administration at Southwestern for “consistently refusing to heed and apply such clear principles of free expression in the governance of an institution of higher learning.”

The “award” is given to individuals and institutions that show egregious disregard for the first amendment.

To Southwestern, I hope your school endures the Bush-esque reign of Dr. Chopra. And I offer my deepest sympathies that Chopra may find such a parallel to be a compliment.