About The Daily Nexus

The Daily Nexus

The Daily Nexus is the student newspaper of the University of California, Santa Barbara, headquartered in Storke Communications Plaza beneath Storke Tower in the Goleta and Isla Vista campus area. Student-managed and editorially independent of faculty and administration, it reports campus and county news, sports and arts for one of the University of California's most distinctive campus communities. Its lineage reaches back to The Eagle, the student newspaper of Santa Barbara State College in the 1930s, with the Nexus name itself adopted in 1970 amid the era's protests.

The Nexus is known nationally for two things beyond its campus reporting: the Hutchins-inspired ideal behind its name, that a free press is the nexus of any democracy, and its role as plaintiff in Regents of the University of California v. Superior Court, the 1999 California Supreme Court case that tested the state's open-meetings law after the UC Regents voted to repeal affirmative action. Both stories express the same conviction, that a student newspaper should behave like a real newspaper, because it is one.

Origins in The Eagle

The Daily Nexus traces its lineage to The Eagle, the student newspaper of Santa Barbara State College in the 1930s, with the paper's formal founding conventionally dated to 1931 as The Eagle. The Nexus's own archive lineage documents a first Eagle issue on 28 September 1923, a reminder that student publishing at Santa Barbara predates even the conventional founding date. After the college joined the University of California system in 1944, the paper evolved through a succession of names: The Roadrunner, El Gaucho, The University Post and The Daily Gaucho.

Each name change tracked the institution's transformation from a state college into a research university campus. The continuity beneath the names is the archive itself, which the Nexus preserves and makes available, allowing readers to follow student life at Santa Barbara across the Depression, wartime, postwar growth and the upheavals of the 1960s in the students' own reporting.

1970: Becoming the Daily Nexus

The modern Daily Nexus emerged from the activism and civil protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1970, after protesters burned the Bank of America building in Isla Vista, the student community neighbouring the campus, editors changed the publication's name to the Daily Nexus to keep with the changing nature of the university. The 1970-71 editorial board drew its inspiration from Robert Maynard Hutchins, the former University of Chicago president, whose formulation held that a free press is the nexus of any democracy.

The choice of name was therefore a manifesto. Nexus means a connection or centre, and the editors were declaring that the newspaper stood at the connection point of democratic life on campus. In a year when Isla Vista itself became a national symbol of student protest, the renamed paper positioned itself as both chronicler of and participant in a community redefining its relationship to the university and the state.

Independence and Student Control

Students run the editorial side of the Daily Nexus independently, without faculty or administration input or guidance. The editor in chief hires the editorial staff and has the final word on what goes to print, while editors train and supervise staff writers and reporters. Students also work on the advertising and business side of the operation, making the Nexus a complete student enterprise rather than a classroom exercise supervised by professionals.

The paper's home reinforces that identity. Its office sits in Storke Communications Plaza beneath Storke Tower, the campus landmark, next to the offices of KCSB-FM, the campus radio station. Funding comes principally from advertising, which supplies about two-thirds of revenue, with the remaining third from a quarterly student lock-in fee of $3.85 per student in the regular year and $1.00 in summer, a fee students themselves vote on every two years. That funding structure ties the paper's survival to both the marketplace and a recurring democratic endorsement by its own readers.

Covering Campus and County

Since 1970 the Daily Nexus has covered campus-related and county-wide news, sports and arts. The county-wide brief distinguishes it from papers confined to campus gates: UCSB's life spills into Isla Vista, Goleta and Santa Barbara, and questions of housing, policing, the environment and local government affect students directly. Nexus reporting on such subjects serves student readers as residents, not merely as enrollees.

Historic coverage shows the paper at work as a community record. Its reporting on the August 1978 earthquake, for example, documented millions of dollars in damage, cracked dormitories, disabled elevators and broken bike paths, and followed the university's scientific response in public information sessions. Decades later, UCSB history projects mine Nexus issues for exactly this kind of contemporaneous detail, using the paper to reconstruct how the campus experienced events from earthquakes to the origins of women's studies in the early 1970s.

The Affirmative Action Lawsuit

The Nexus's most consequential legal fight began with the UC Regents' vote of 20 July 1995 to repeal the university's affirmative action policy. The paper alleged that, through private telephone calls, the 25-member board, which included Governor Pete Wilson, had solicited votes to repeal the policy before the public meeting, violating the state's open-meetings law. The lawsuit, led within the paper by staff writer Tim Molloy, was filed in February 1996; the Nexus maintained it had not learned of the calls until more than 30 days after they occurred.

The case reached the California Supreme Court as Regents of the University of California v. Superior Court. On 1 June 1999 the court ruled for the Regents on the threshold question: a 30-day statute of limitations applied and had expired when the suit was filed. The court therefore never decided whether the Regents' conduct had violated the open-meetings law at all. The decision is a leading student-press law case, studied precisely because a student newspaper carried an open-government challenge to the state's highest court.

Reaction and Legal Legacy

Contemporaries understood the ruling's practical effect immediately. Nexus attorney Dan Tokaji argued that the decision struck at the open-meetings act by offering officials a recipe for acting in secret and escaping review if concealment lasted thirty days, and editor in chief Matt Hurst noted that the paper was never given the chance to prove its allegations. Student Press Law Center coverage of the case preserved those reactions and the holding together, which is how the case entered the teaching canon for student journalists.

For the Nexus, losing on limitations did not end the principle. The litigation demonstrated that the paper would spend years and legal resources defending public access to university governance, even against its own university's governing board. That willingness is a large part of why the case, though decided against the paper, enhanced rather than diminished its reputation.

Other Press-Freedom Defences

The open-meetings case was not the paper's only encounter with legal pressure. Student Press Law Center archives group the Nexus with student newspapers that successfully resisted subpoenas seeking unpublished materials in unrelated criminal cases, and with papers that confronted the theft of free newspapers on campus, where police sometimes doubted that taking free copies could be a crime. Those episodes, spread across the paper's modern history, show a newsroom repeatedly required to defend the legal foundations of student journalism.

Such defences are costly in time and attention for a staff that turns over every year. That the Nexus sustained them reflects institutional memory: editors pass down not only stylebooks and beats but the knowledge that the paper has stood its ground before and can do so again.

The Daily Nexus Today

The Daily Nexus continues as a student-run weekly publication in print with a continuous web presence, reporting news, sports and arts for UCSB and its surrounding community from beneath Storke Tower. Its staff structure, funding model and editorial independence remain recognisably those established in the decades after 1970. The paper's FAQ and archives keep its lineage visible to new staff and readers, connecting each year's reporters to The Eagle's successors and to the editors who renamed the paper in a season of protest.

Ninety years after its Eagle origins and more than fifty years after it took the Nexus name, the paper's founding idea still describes its practice. A campus democracy needs a place where information connects: where regents' votes, Isla Vista rents, Gaucho sports and student art meet on the same pages and are argued over in the open. The Daily Nexus was renamed to be that place, and its legal and journalistic record shows it taking the assignment seriously.