* The Chronicle of Higher Education…

Dylan Hembrough was in class when he got the email: He had been reported to the university police by an administrator at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. The surprise email sent Hembrough, the editor in chief of the campus newspaper, the closest he’d been to a panic attack in years. […]

According to the email, the university’s director of communications had reported him for a line in an email he had sent to her that read, “Marketing and communications’ insistence on interfering with our newsgathering process is dangerous and detrimental to both press freedom and freedom of speech.”

* The Alestle’s Editor-in-Chief Dylan Hembrough…

I have served as editor-in-chief of The Alestle, the independent student newspaper at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, for three years now, so I have seen the gradual — and then dramatic — degradation of our relationship with SIUE’s administration.

It started in fall 2024 after we published a story exposing practices in University Housing that stifled employees’ freedom of speech. The university’s legal counsel said in a letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression that SIUE believed The Alestle’s reporting was inaccurate. When I asked over email what was inaccurate about the story in order to issue a correction, she refused to say.

In March 2025, we published a 15-month investigation into the administration’s “salary sweeps,” which at that point had resulted in more than $15 million being taken from departments across campus and put into a series of “strategic” accounts. While unfortunately there ended up being a couple of inaccuracies in our article — we had inadvertently underreported how much administration actually took, and apologized appropriately — Chancellor James T. Minor used this as an excuse to close off communication with The Alestle about this subject.

In February 2026, our chancellor sent a letter to “university leadership” — deans and heads of departments — baselessly discrediting our reporting. This letter was sent in response to a breaking story we published a few days earlier, detailing the clerical workers’ union’s decision to file a cease-and-desist against SIUE for unfair labor practices. Despite calling our reporting “predictably poor, inaccurate and incomplete,” the chancellor provided zero evidence of any actual inaccuracy.

Most recently, University Marketing and Communications — which is in close contact with the chancellor and shares his disposition on The Alestle — began demanding to sit in on and record some of The Alestle’s interviews. Moves such as these threaten freedom of speech and freedom of the press, allowing the SIUE administration to shape a story in real time and potentially frighten employees into self-censoring.

And through it all, SIUE claims it is fully supportive of a free, independent student press. Clearly, its actions do not match its words.

What keeps us at The Alestle reporting is our dedication to the truth, to the facts and to our duty to disseminate information to the campus community. The administration is well-known by now for its lack of transparency and, now that it sent an open letter to every university community member making a number of false claims about The Alestle, its complete willingness to distort reality to fit its narrative.

* From Illinois’ College Campus Press Act…

All campus media produced primarily by students at a State-sponsored institution of higher learning is a public forum for expression by the student journalists and editors at the particular institution. Campus media, whether campus-sponsored or noncampus-sponsored, is not subject to prior review by public officials of a State-sponsored institution of higher learning.

* Back to the Chronicle of Higher Education…

After [Nicole Franklin, the university’s communications director,] continued to ask to join interviews, Hembrough emailed her on September 3, requesting that she not attend a planned interview, the same email that Franklin then forwarded to police.

Franklin forwarded the message to the university police, along with a note, which she shared with The Chronicle, stating that Hembrough’s email was “quite incendiary and harmful to my safety.” She added that she had been rattled the day before by someone who had identified themselves as an Alestle reporter stopping by her office to see her, as well as by critical replies about her on The Alestle’s social-media posts. “This has become an unsafe environment for me,” she wrote in the note.

That prompted an officer to email Hembrough, stating that they were putting together a police report on “allegations of harassment” that stemmed from his email to Franklin, particularly the “dangerous and detrimental” sentence. “I do not believe this statement in and of itself to be harassing in nature,” the officer added. “I am merely gathering your side to complete the report.”