Ouster at School Paper Defended

Contrary to allegations that his First Amendment rights had been abridged, the publications manager of the Cal State Los Angeles student newspaper, who was fired Thursday, was dismissed because of unsatisfactory job performance, a university official said Friday.

Marc Haefele became the second such official of the University Times to be fired in less than a year. He alleged that, like his predecessor, Joan Zyda, he was dismissed because of conflicts with administrators over negative articles he assigned about campus activities.

However, Charles Simmons, the newspaper’s faculty adviser and Haefele’s supervisor, said Haefele was fired because he allowed too many errors--such as “misspellings and headlines without verbs”--to appear in the paper.

Since he became faculty adviser last September, “there has never been any censorship or arguments about what we should cover,” said Simmons, who taught journalism for 10 years at Howard University in Washington. “We have had a serious problem with the quality, the most serious problems I have ever seen at a college newspaper.”