University of Arizona student Julianne Stanford reports on the serious hazards faced by student magazines on California campuses that bear the symbols of the Republican Party and articles questioning the American Studies Association’s anti-Israel boycott.

The leaders of a student-run magazine that put an elephant symbol associated with the Republican Party on the cover of a recent edition found copies of that publication destroyed, the first in a series of incidents forcing the journalists to defend themselves and their periodical against defamatory claims.

The Claremont Independent dared to brandish the symbol on the cover of its February issue, advertising for an article titled “2014: Year of the Elephant.” The article, written by Harry Arnold, predicted a Republican victory in the upcoming midterm elections that included gaining the majority in the senate.

But copies of that edition were found ripped apart on the Scripps College campus, a progressive liberal arts women’s college in the Southern California-based Claremont University Consortium, comprised of Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College and Pitzer College.

“We didn’t see it happen, so I’m not sure if it was students or a townie, but I went back the day after we put them out and about a dozen of them were torn up,” editor in chief of the Independent, Brad Richardson, said in an email interview with The College Fix.

Richardson said that issues of the magazine were placed outside of the college’s dining hall in the newsstand, and when he returned a day later, he found copies to be torn in half horizontally but still held together at the spine. They were scattered all over the newsstand area.

…The magazine is an independent, non-partisan, student-run publication distributed to all of the undergraduate colleges in the Claremont consortium. It seeks to give an alternative perspective to students at the largely left-leaning institutions.Richardson said the magazine is exactly as its name suggests – a nonpartisan publication.

Although “it’s not really a huge secret that we’ve often served as a kind of haven for conservative and libertarian commentary on campus,” the magazine has an “ideologically diverse staff,” Richardson said.

But the elephant prompted student columnist Matt Dahl of The Student Life, the official newspaper of the Claremont colleges, to dedicate an entire column to trashing the Independent after flipping through the magazine, even though “the large elephant on the cover should have tipped me off.”

…Dahl had called the boycott “a serious and reasonable move toward checking Israeli dominance and resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” which would have a “long-term result of increased liberty for all.”