Hanrahan also said The Chart over the years has enjoyed a track record of support from the university administration.

“Whenever we’ve had a question, the administration has been great to us,” he said. “I’ve been here 3 1/2 years as adviser, and we’ve never had a problem. This is why this took us by surprise.”

In addition to talking with Chart representatives, Speck said he spoke briefly with Skaggs on Thursday but did not discuss the specific events of Wednesday.

Speck said he had read the enrollment story, and that he believed the reporting was fair.

“As far as I know, nothing was taken out of context,” he said. “I didn’t infer from anything that there was misreporting.”

Speck said enrollment had declined by 329 students compared with the total for the fall semester of 2007, and that the enrollment decline is something the university staff takes seriously.

“I think there is a kind of spotlight on the negative enrollment,” he said. “I’m not saying that’s inappropriate. All of us are concerned that we increase our enrollment, because that’s a major source of funding.”

The Chart receives a significant portion of its operating budget from the university, but Speck said he does not advocate administrators trying to control the paper’s content.

“It’s a student newspaper,” he said. “I don’t believe we should tell them what to print, what not to print. I don’t have any intention to intervene with what The Chart does.”

Speck declined to comment on whether the action constituted a First Amendment issue.

“Since it’s risen to the level of a legal question, I think it’s a matter for legal interpretation,” he said.

A lawyer for the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit legal assistance service for college and high-school journalists, said colleges have a right to censor content from college papers, but only in extreme situations — such as a report that would tell students how to set a false fire alarm or hack into a school’s computer system.

“That’s a very high threshold,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director for the Arlington, Va.-based center. “It’s not in the least bit satisfied by saying your newspaper will make the university look bad.”

LoMonte said the general legal rule is that students are entitled to the full benefit of the First Amendment, even when their publications are under the auspices of a college or university. He said interfering with a paper’s ability to distribute can qualify as censorship.

“Certainly, moving newspapers out of a distribution point is a form of censorship,” he said. “It’s one thing to take a stack of papers that’s blocking a fire exit, but as long as they are in a place where they can be displayed, removing them because of their editorial content is a form of censorship.”