Dear Bison,
For over 100 years, The Hilltop has recorded life at Howard University, holding the school accountable, celebrating our community and giving students a platform to tell their own stories. Maintaining an independent student newspaper requires more than the ability to publish. It requires resources, infrastructure and institutional support.
To the class of 2030, welcome to Howard. You are joining a community with a long history of student journalism, as you will see in the stories in this issue. As you begin your time here, I implore you to consider what it takes to preserve that tradition and what happens when the systems supporting student journalism fail.
In 1977, California enacted the first New Voices law, protecting student journalists working for school-sponsored media at public K-12 schools. Similar protections for student expression at public colleges and universities are established separately under state law. At private institutions, press freedom can be complicated. Student publications do not necessarily have the same legal protections as their public counterparts, and they receive varying levels of support from their administration, both financially and in terms of resources.
At Howard, while The Hilltop is entirely student-led, it is not financially independent from the university. All content produced is pitched and written by students, without any interference from the university. However, the Office of the Vice President of Student Affairs (OVPSA) serves as a publisher for the newspaper, regulating high-level logistics through The Hilltop policy board and supplying funding. While this is a privilege, it comes with challenges.
The upside is that we are able to pay for things like equipment, our website and domain and our quarterly print editions like the one you are reading now. The downside is we sometimes face the same administrative issues that we cover in the paper. While we have long been committed to reporting on the “Howard runaround” and areas where the school falls short, in the past year we came to experience it firsthand.
In early 2025, our website began displaying error codes intermittently, becoming more and more frequent leading up to Howard’s centennial Homecoming. It became so frequent that our website was down for days and weeks at a time, preventing us from publishing the stories we were working on. In September 2025, we had to resort to breaking news on social media before publishing on our website, which is outside of The Hilltop’s norm.
The website’s malfunction went on too long and continued after several requests for support from the OVPSA. On a few occasions, The Hilltop’s OVPSA liaison assisted in technical troubleshooting in October and early November, but none of the assessments were successful. After a recommendation from a professor in the Cathy Hughes School of Communications, an external expert conducted a review of a website and found a temporary solution in the middle of November. The website worked much better for several months, but has recently displayed the same error codes it did prior. Currently, The Hilltop’s OVPSA liason is assisting with another technical evaluation.
We experienced this without the support of a technical editorial advisor, who assists and guides the newspaper. Keith Alexander, a Hilltop alumnus who served as editorial advisor for four years, vacated the position in the summer of 2025, and it was up to the OVPSA to find a replacement. The Hilltop lacked hands-on professional guidance for the majority of the school year until the OVPSA hired two new technical advisors in March of 2026.
More recently, in July of 2026, I received an email from our publishing company with an outstanding invoice of several unpaid bills totaling nearly $14,000, stating that we would not be able to print our annual Freshmen Edition if they remained unpaid. The bills spanned from 2024-2026. I communicated this immediately to our liaisons in OVPSA and had to follow up multiple times before it was paid.
As student journalists, we try to act with urgency and care to deliver accurate news to you quickly, even if the same urgency and care is not reciprocated. It is unfair to The Hilltop’s staff and to you, the Howard community. In this issue, there are stories about a recent enrollment crisis and a lack of food options on campus, and in my time as editor-in-chief, we’ve covered more areas where the community criticizes Howard for not prioritizing its students.
Direct censorship is a crisis facing newspapers across the media industry, even at other historically Black colleges and universities. The Hilltop is fortunate to have maintained our journalistic independence, but our experiences over the past year beg the question: at what point does a consistent lack of institutional support for student media become de facto censorship? The Hilltop has endured for a century. I hope it will live for another 100 years, but that can only happen with the full support of the Howard community and administration.
A free press is only as strong as the support behind it.
In Truth and Service,
Sydney Goitia-Doran
Editor-in-Chief