THN Editorial: Publishing Controversial Opinions

The article “American Decline due to Growing Lack of Faith?” by Paul Sheehan ’25 was
published in the Crossfire column on April 21 in The Hill News. This piece was met with a lot of backlash, so the editorial board wanted to address it.

The articles published in The Hill News, specifically in the opinions section, do not reflect the beliefs of the editorial board. In fact, the editors on the whole agree that the article held misogynistic and homophobic beliefs.

We communicated with Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion Kimberly Flint Hamilton to ensure that the article did not reach the point of hate speech that would meet the criteria of a bias incident. Hamilton informed us that it did not reach the point of hate speech. But of course, the line of what this might be is a blurry. So, who is the editorial board the ones to decide what can be censored? The opinions section is a place for opinions of all sides to be published. The Hill News does not want to silence opinions we do not agree with, just as we would wish that our opinions would not be silenced at a university where we were not the majority.

In regards to the online version of the article, we published the article as normal on The Hill News website. It received a myriad of comments, and most of them were expressing outrage at the
claims Sheehan was making. A few comments threatened Sheehan’s safety or said other things that could cause The Hill News, Thelmo, and St. Lawrence University to be legally liable. Thus, the University legal team required that we remove comments. However, the editorial team agreed that the censorship of one side of this conversation while the article was not censored at all despite any problematic claims was not something we could stand behind. Thus, we decided to take the entire article down.

The article is back up with comments simply moderated to ensure THN and the University can face no legal repercussions.