Perspectives: Daily’s 125th at ‘U’ recalls varied cases

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One of the many institutions experiencing longevity milestones in Minnesota during the past year is the Minnesota Daily, which is this week commemorating the conclusion of its 125th year of publication on the campus of the University of Minnesota. E.g., Perspectives “Mitchell Hamline at 125 years recalls past litigation” in the Dec. 15, 2025, edition of Minnesota Lawyer; “Delta’s centenary recalls turbulent legal lore” in the Dec. 22, 2025, edition of Minnesota Lawyer.

Started on May 1, 1900, at the end of the school year overlapping the19th and 20th centuries, the newspaper has had a storied history of producing top-flight journalists and garnering many awards.

One of the features of the student-run newspaper, which converted from print to on-line in 2022, is its involvement in groundbreaking litigation. The end of its 125th year of publication — from hard copy to electronic — provides an opportune occasion to review some of those legal disputes that have helped define the venerable publication.

Salisbury smoking

One of the first legal contretemps the Daily faced occurred in the Roaring Twenties when its editor-in -chief, Harrison Salisbury, was suspended for a year for his part in a protest of a smoking ban in the library. The brouhaha was covered in the New York Times, the newspaper that Salisbury, a Minneapolis native, later worked for during the prime of his journalistic career.

Salisbury was never litigated at a time when student rights were nonexistent. Those rights did not come into existence until the Supreme Court famously ruled that the Constitution “does not stop at the schoolhouse door” in a Vietnam War protest case, Tinker v. Des Moines Ind. School District, 393 U.S. 593 (1969).

Salisbury was one of many illustrious graduates of North High School in Minneapolis, an eclectic group that includes such figures as Gov. Floyd B. Olson, federal Judge Earl Larson, the singing Andrews Sisters trio, Terry Lewis and Flyte Time musicians, “Man from U. N.C. L. E.” television spy star Robert Vaughn; basketball star and three-time state tournament champion Khalid El-Amin and girls basketball greats and state champs Tamara Moore and Mauri Horton; prize fighting boxers Ralph Rodriguez and Steve Silver; football star and Super Bowl winning wide receiver Tyler Johnson; radio broadcaster and voice-over superstar Tom Barnard; WCCO radio broadcaster Howard Viken; left-wing labor union advocate Farrell Dobbs; DuPont CEO Irving Shapiro; civil rights leader W. Harry Davis; sports journalist Sid Hartman; and the writer of this column, among many luminaries.

The smoking Salisbury went on to become a high-profile journalist for the Times, winning acclaim for his extremely influential reporting from the South during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and later winning a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the protests in Tiananmen Square in China in 1989, among other top-flight reporting, and authoring 29 books.

“[W]hether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

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“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”
Mark Twain (1835-1919)

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“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose.”
Iconoclastic journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Constitutional ‘chill’

A half-century later, after the smoke cleared from the library, a series of Salisbury’s Daily successors took on the university over a four-year span involving a policy adopted by the Board of Regents to restrict the newspaper’s funding due to publication of an offensive “Finals Week” humor issue at the end of 1978-79 school year, and they ultimately prevailed in Stanley v. Magrath, 719 F.2d 279 (8th Cir. 1983).

The case, which was covered by the New York Times, arose when the Regents in response to a huge statewide outcry about the annual end-of-school-year “Humor” edition, which contained off-color language and a front page picture accompanying a mock interview with of a character adorned as Jesus Christ on a cross in which he urged students to fornicate and “take drugs.” That elicited a pair of legislative hearings calling for shutting down the Daily and sanctioning its student leaders. Stopping short of that punitive action, the Regents, at the urging of the school’s administration, changed the mandatory student fees that partially funded the newspaper, to an opt-out system, which the Daily challenged as First Amendment retaliation.

The lawsuit brought in the names of the student editors, was rejected by the U.S. District Court in St. Paul, but the 8th Circuit unanimously reversed, holding that the tinkering with the newspaper’s funding, although only resulting in a slight diminution in revenue, infringed the First Amendment right of freedom of expression.

One of the key features of the Daily’s victory was testimony of a pair of renowned journalists who pointed to the chilling effects of the retaliation on freedom of press: Charles Bailey, the editor of the Star Tribune newspaper and none other than the Pulitzer Prize reporter of the New York Times, Salisbury himself.

‘Sunshine’ suits

The Daily was involved in a number of lawsuits over the Minnesota “Sunshine” statutes, the Open Meeting Law, Minn. Stat. § 13D.01, et seq. and the Government Data Practices Act, Minn. Stat. § 13.01, all involving a variety of claims seeking access to information from the university.

A case that was unsuccessful but was a precursor to a later one that succeeded was Minnesota Daily v. Board of Regents, 432 N.W.2d 189 (Minn. App. 1988) rev. den’d. (Minn. Jan. 25, 1989). It claimed that the university violated the “Sunshine” laws by failing to identify candidates for a vacancy in the university’s presidency. The Court of Appeals held that the data generated by an advisory group created by the Board of Regents to vet candidates was not covered by the Open Meeting Law on grounds that it was not a “governing body” subject to the statute.

But the lawsuit had productive results, including amendment of the statute to extend more broadly to government entities as well as encouraging more transparency in future presidential selections at the institution.

The case became the precursor for a subsequent lawsuit by a coalition of mainstream Twin Cities media, including the Daily, which prevailed in a similar “Sunshine” lawsuit in Star Tribune v. Board of Regents, 683 N.W.2d 274 (Minn. 2004), in which the Supreme Court held that the open meeting law and Government Data Practices Act, § 13.01 et seq. required the board to announce its findings for the position, which ushered in greater transparency. However, in follow-up litigation, the court rejected awarding for attorney’s fees against the school.

The Daily engaged in other “Sunshine” legal actions in issues of unreported cases in Hennepin County District Court in the latter part of the 20th century.

In Minnesota Daily v. The University of Minnesota, Hennepin County District Court, (1988), the student newspaper sought an internal report prepared by the school regarding infractions of the NCAA rules by the football and basketball programs. The trial court ruled that the report must be produced under the Data Practices Act, subject to deletion of specific names or other unique identifying characteristics, which may be confidential “personnel data” under the act. The appellate court granted the university a brief stay, which was then dissolved within a week, permitting the report to be made public.

A year later, in mid-1989, the student newspaper again sued the university under the Data Practices Act for another NCAA report, this one dealing with additional irregularities in the basketball and football programs. The Minnesota Daily v. The University of Minnesota, Hennepin County District Court, File No. 896935. The Daily again prevailed and was granted access to the report which led to stiff sanctions imposed by the NCAA on the university’s athletic program.

 In another case, the publication achieved access to a salacious videotape of a marital sexual encounter involving the two coaches of the women’s gymnastics team. That precipitated the firing of the woman head coach, who had inadvertently supplied the film to the team thinking it was a training film. Her husband, assistant coach, stayed on, a different treatment that disturbed some equal rights observers.

The newspaper also achieved access a few years later in another Hennepin County District court case to records dealing with the veterinary school’s experimental testing of animals, which led to changes in protocols at that unit.

One case that made it to the Court of Appeals involved an effort by the newspaper to bar access to unpublished photos and testimony by a photographer concerning a fracas on campus during a student protest.

The newspaper’s objection to a subpoena issued by the prosecution in an assault charge went through a circuitous route of lower court rulings before the Court of Appeals rejected the Daily’s claim under the “Shield Law,” formerly known as the Free Flow of Information Act, Minn. Stat. § 595.22 in State v. Knutson, 523 N.W.2d 909 (Minn App. 1994), rev. den’d. (Minn. Jun 13, 1990). The Court ruled that neither the statute nor the First Amendment bars the photographer from testifying as to the observations.

The underlying criminal case proceeded to trial, which resulted in an acquittal of the accused, who was represented by Keith Ellison before his election to Congress and later as attorney general.

In another First Amendment case, the Daily lost the proverbial battle but won the case in a woman’s defamation case, Naylor v. Minnesota Daily, 342 N.W.2d 632 (Minn. 1984). The state Supreme Court held that the lawsuit overcame failure to provide timely notice of claim under Minn. Stat. § 13.736, subd. 5, because the statute was “not a jurisdictional predicate.”

On remand, a Hennepin County jury ruled in favor of the student newspaper, rejecting the claimant’s contention  that a caption under a photograph of her  stating that she was “cruising” while strolling on the Midway  at the State Fair  was a defamatory implication that she was a prostitute. Rather, it decided that the term  was  a nonpejorative phrase.

These legal brouhahas, published and unpublished alike, have characterized the 125-year-old university student publication as it proceeds to its second quasquicentennial.

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PERSPECTIVE POINTERS

Names of a dozen other Minnesota college newspapers

Augsburg: The Echo

Bemidji State: Northern Student

Carleton: The Carletonian

Concordia College: The Concordian

Hamline: The Oracle

Luther Seminary: The Concord

Macalester: The Mac Weekly

St. Cloud State: The Chronicle

St. Olaf: The Manitou Messenger

St. Thomas: The Aquin

UMD Duluth: The Statesman

Winona State: The Winonian

Marshall H. Tanick is an attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer, Njus, Tanick, Linder & Robbins, PA.