East Carolina University’s decision to fire Paul Isom, student media adviser, certainly appears to be the by-product of a bad editorial decision by the student editors of the campus newspaper. If there is more to it than that, Isom’s university colleagues, the students and the rest of us may never fully know.

That’s because the whole thing now resides in a purgatory called “personnel matters” — a place generally impervious to public records law. In other words, the university is not completely at liberty to tell its side of this story, whatever it might be, without special consideration.

The unfortunate result is an information vacuum that leads to speculation and conclusion jumping, and the university becomes the bad guy — in this case, the institutional demagogue running roughshod over First Amendment rights of free expression. 

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