CORRECTION APPENDED

Drawing protests from students and journalism faculty, University of Southern California (USC) administrators this week barred the re-election of the student daily newspaper’s editor in chief after he was nominated by the paper’s staff.

USC senior Zach Fox resigned Tuesday from his post as the Daily Trojan’s leader after he was told his re-nomination would be blocked.

The paper, while entirely student-run, is not fiscally independent from the school, which requires the chief of the paper to be approved by a Media Board after being elected by the staff.

Fox was nominated for the paper’s top position by the Daily Trojan staff on a 37-to-21 vote. But the USC vice president for student affairs, Michael L. Jackson, who is the intermediary between the paper and the board, withheld Fox’s application.

Fox said he received a phone call Monday telling him the proposals in his application were “outside the realm of the job description.”

He told The Crimson that the rejection was “a violation of editorial independence.”

His application called for a student role in reviewing the paper’s budget, which is controlled by the school. The staff of the paper had pressed administrators about the school’s lack of financial transparency earlier this year, but were told “this is our budget, not yours,” according to city editor Joanna Lin.

But Jackson created a task force addressing the issue, according to a memo authored by Media Board member Larry Pryor, who is also an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism.

“This is not a free speech issue,” Pryor wrote in the memo. “Zach rightly brought attention to problems that should be addressed and, as a result, are now being actively dealt with. It’s a pity he couldn’t be more patient.”

“By resigning, he puts himself in the unfortunate and unproductive role of martyr,” Pryor wrote.

Former editors of the Daily Trojan wrote a letter published in the paper expressing outrage over the USC administration’s move. “Jackson is not a staff member of the Daily Trojan, nor is he a student,” they wrote, criticizing that he nevertheless “can decide which student will sit at the helm of this 94-year-old publication.”

Brendan Loy, another former editor who graduated in 2003, wrote in a separate letter that “the administration has for years been treating the ostensibly independent Daily Trojan like just another department under its thumb.”

Some staffers said they plan to renominate Fox in a second election slated to take place today.

Fox said he did not know if he would heed the call. “I feel like it might be beneficial, not to stop fighting this, but if someone else were to fight it so that the administration would realize that this is a demand for transparency that hopefully won’t go away.”

The Crimson is editorially and fiscally independent from the University. Its leadership is chosen solely by the paper’s outgoing staff.

CORRECTION: The print and original online versions of this story inaccurately reported the vote total in the Daily Trojan's editor-in-chief elections. Fox was elected by a margin of 38-21.