Want to know how fast a modern American university can go from championing open debate to squelching it?

     Just ask Jillian Bandes. The University of North Carolina junior wrote a column supporting racial profiling for her campus paper, the Daily Tar Heel. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, she was fired. Just like that-- from First Amendment to fireable offense in slightly more than 24 hours. How did it happen?

     The paper’s opinion editor Chris Coletta wrote a column for the Daily Tar Heel Thursday, which included the reasoning for Bandes’ firing:

Some of you called it [the column] racist. Some of you called Bandes’ words a fundamental breach of integrity and journalistic standards. Some of you called for my head, not to mention hers.

But that’s not why Bandes got fired. It happened because she lied to her sources and readers.

Unlike two DTH alumni who resigned from The Reidsville Review this summer, Bandes didn’t inaccurately quote anyone. (I have her notes as proof.)    

     Coletta has notes that prove Bandes quoted her sources accurately, so where’s the lying to sources and readers?

Bandes told the three people quoted in her column — students Sherief Khaki and Muhammad Salameh, as well as professor Nasser Isleem — that she was writing an article about Arab-American relations in a post-9/11 world. …

Racial profiling was, in fact, part of their conversation. But it wasn’t their entire conversation. At no point did Khaki, Salameh or Nasser ever think the only quotes Bandes would use would be their comments on the subject.

     Forgive me if I don’t think this passes the smell test. Bandes was fired just one day after her column ran. She was a one-year veteran of the paper’s staff and former member of the editorial board, but was given no chance to defend herself or apologize before her dismissal. And all this despite the fact that there is proof that she didn’t actually misquote anyone.

     Coletta initially declined to comment for this column, but in a phone interview Thursday night, he said he understands that some conservatives think this was a case of a liberal editor bending to pressure on a liberal campus, but defended his decision to fire Bandes.

     “It’s not a matter of politics,” Coletta said. “It’s a matter of trying to stand up for good journalism….A liberal columnist would have been fired as quickly as Jillian was.”

     He believes that even though Bandes’ quotes were technically accurate, she left out necessary context, thereby misrepresenting her sources.

     Coletta has agreed to run a letter from Bandes defending herself in Friday’s edition of the Daily Tar Heel. Here is her version of the events.

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     Bandes said she breached no journalistic ethics and is being punished for writing a controversial column.

     “You can’t say I’m misquoting someone when I quoted them correctly,” Bandes said.

     She interviewed three Arab and Arab-American acquaintances for her column, asking their opinions on racial profiling, among other things. None were enthusiastic about profiling, but said they would be willing to submit to it because it could save American lives, including their own. She quoted them as such.

     She also said her sources knew she was writing about racial profiling, and that she posed the racial profiling question to one source in several different ways during a 10-minute interview.

     “They were pretty receptive. They were very helpful,” she said. “They certainly got the picture.”

     Bandes did not hear directly from her sources, but said Coletta told her they were uncomfortable with their quotes being used in conjunction with some of the hyperbolic phrases Bandes used to get her point across. The placement of the quotes, they said, falsely implied that they agreed with those phrases. In her first line, she wrote, “I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.”

     Later, she wrote that she wants Arabs to get “sexed up” in airport security, referring to the aggressive pat-downs passengers are sometimes subject to. Bandes said the column was meant to be “racy,” but not to personally offend her sources. She regrets offending people she cares about—her sources were acquaintances she had met through involvement in her Arabic 101 class and her membership in the Middle Eastern Students Forum—but she doesn’t apologize for supporting racial profiling.

     Her editor liked the tone of the column before it ran, she said.

     “They laughed,” she said, referring to Coletta and editor Ryan Tuck. “They thought it was really funny and well-written.”

     They told her it was a rabble-rousing column that would spark debate, and that’s what Bandes was hired for, she said. She was given a weekly column after serving on the Daily Tar Heel’s editorial board last year. Tuesday’s column was her third of the school year. After a year of being in the political minority on the editorial board, she was excited to let loose on issues she’s passionate about.

     “My goal is to get people talking,” she said. “My editor hired me—he’s told me on many occasions—he hired me for that reason. I was supposed to make noise on the back page.”

     She got people talking, all right. By Wednesday, the column had elicited more than 50 comments in the online feedback section of the Daily Tar Heel. The Muslim Student Association had spoken out about it, and Bandes herself was getting plenty of e-mail—some supportive, some negative, some profane. Continued...