Right to record
Maybe Jerome L. Reide had a point.
And under CMU's current videotaping policy, he did.
Last March, Reide pointed to a Central Michigan Life videographer during his open forum and ordered the video camera be turned off. Reide, then a finalist for associate vice president for institutional diversity, said the videographer needed everyone's permission to be videotaped.
The videographer kept taping.
Dean of Students Bruce Roscoe last week said the university has a policy against videotaping people without their permission in certain instances.
Basically people have a "right to be free as they go about their business" when they are in classes, offices and places of residence, Roscoe said.
That part of the policy is reasonable.
However, Roscoe also said the right to record open sessions have not been addressed yet. Open forums would fall under this umbrella.
The university must include open sessions in its policy. If it doesn't, people like Reide will have the authority to stop people from recording. This cannot happen.
When people attend an open session, they automatically give permission to be videotaped because they are in a public place.
Sure, there may be some exceptions, such as when an entertainer has it in his or her contract to not be videotaped by outside sources.
But for university-sanctioned events, it must be in the policy that permission is not needed. It must be deemed as a public place. Otherwise, the session wouldn't be "open."
The policy came to light after Roscoe sent a letter to Topinabee junior Dennis Lennox II, asking him not to videotape on campus without people's consent.
Lennox said he lodged a complaint against the university with the American Civil Liberties Union on Thursday. He said CMU is violating the First Amendment.
The ACLU will be hard pressed to find a case against CMU - if CMU adds to its policy that open sessions are a public place.
Still, this complaint may force the university to take a closer look at its policy.
In this case, the university is trying to stop one student. Lennox often harasses Gary Peters, Griffin endowed chair, with his video camera by following him around. This is legal because as a candidate for state Congress, Peters is a public figure. However, from a journalistic standpoint, this is unethical.
The university cannot punish everyone because of Lennox's actions.
If a media outlet, or any student, wants to videotape an open session, they should be allowed to do so.
And it should state just that in the university policy.
