Judge orders Bosley's reinstatement as Viking News adviser

U.S. District Judge Stanley Chesler, who is hearing the lawsuit filed by three Viking News student-journalists against Ocean County College, has ordered Prof. Karen Bosley to be reinstated as Viking News adviser through a temporary restraining order issued Wednesday.

From the Student Press Law Center story:

A federal district court issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday that will reinstate a student newspaper adviser who was removed for what students claim was retaliation for stories they printed.

Three editors at the Ocean County College student newspaper, the Viking News, filed a lawsuit in May against college President Jon Larson and several other administrators after the school removed longtime newspaper adviser Karen Bosley. The lawsuit alleges that Bosley’s removal was the result of retaliation for several stories the newspaper wrote critical of the school’s administration. The preliminary injunction is a decision that will allow Bosley to continue to advise the Viking News while the lawsuit is underway. Bosley has filed a similar separate lawsuit.

In his opinion (click to read PDF of the decision), Judge Stanley R. Chesler wrote that the school’s decision to remove Bosley had violated the students’ First Amendment rights.

Chesler wrote that “granting such an injunction is an extraordinary measure that should only be done in limited circumstances,” but that in this case, “it is clear that such a retaliatory removal would, nonetheless, have an impermissibly chilling effect on the paper’s student editors’ freedom of expression in future issues of the paper, and inflict irreparable harm on the Plaintiffs.”

Read the full story.