At first, Brent Sumner was excited.
Newspaper stand after newspaper stand was empty, he noticed, as he made his way to his office at the UVU Review — and it was only Thursday morning.
"I thought, 'That's great, people are reading our paper,'" said Sumner, the student media coordinator for the weekly newspaper.
But the closer he got to his office, the more uneasy Sumner felt. Wednesday the racks were nearly full. Could readership really have gone up that much that quickly?
"As I kept walking, I saw they were all empty," he said. "I decided to check the rest of campus. All those were empty, too — dining services, the student center, everything was empty."
Sumner estimated 3,500 copies of the UVU Review, which is distributed on Monday mornings, went missing. He was able to salvage only 250 of the papers from a couple of racks in an out-of-the-way corner of campus. Checks of nearby recycling bins and trash cans revealed no trace of the papers.
UVU prints about 4,000 copies of the UVU Review weekly. Printing costs usually ring in at around $900, Sumner said.
Based on past circulation statistics, the newspaper staff suspects someone — perhaps upset with some content — may have taken the papers.
"I call that theft," Sumner said.
UVU campus police are looking into the issue, but the school is still stewing over a more troubling concern.
"This is a possible First Amendment issue and we are taking it very seriously," said Chris Taylor, associate vice president of university marketing and communications. "We are investigating it accordingly."
The newspaper staff is baffled as to what may have prompted the suspected thief to haul away thousands of copies of the UVU Review.
"I mean, it wasn't like they just dumped them into the nearest trash can," said Jack Waters, UVU Review's editor-in-chief. "Whoever it was had to put in some work to get that many papers off campus."
There were only about 20 news stories in the March 23 issue of the paper, Waters said. Of those, he and his colleagues could only identify two that may be considered controversial.
One, an editorial written by a staff writer, advocated some controversial changes be made to the UVU student government elections. The other, an opinion piece, criticized the Board of Regent's recent decision to make former Brigham Young University political science professor Matthew Holland UVU's new president.
"I am floored that someone would do this," Waters said. "This is the squashing of free speech."
The newspaper staff refuses to be silenced, however. Waters said all of the articles published in this week's paper will be reprinted alongside next week's content.
"Our writers deserve the opportunity to have those opinions and article on the stands," he said. "Our readers have the right to see them."
E-MAIL: estuart@desnews.com