Montclair State University’s student government has blocked publication of the campus’s student newspaper and frozen its budget in a dispute over the paper’s legal challenge to the government’s practice of meeting in private. According to an account of the dispute in The Montclarion, the newspaper hired a lawyer to pursue its claim that the New Jersey Open Public Meetings Act forbids the student government to meet privately.
The student government’s president, Ronald F. Chicken, and its executive treasurer, Melissa Revesz, sent a letter to the newspaper asserting that hiring the lawyer violated procedures for expenditures of student funds. The officials also notified the newspaper’s printer of the budget freeze and told it not to print the paper.
The newspaper, which continues to publish online, receives $16,500 per semester from the student government. —Andrew Mytelka
