Education
PSC Student: Magazine Was a Class Project the College Knew About All Along
Casey Hignite, a Pensacola State College student whose work appears in the suppressed arts-and-culture magazine Just Opposed, says the administration had every opportunity to raise concerns—and waited until the week before print to pull the plug.
Why this matters: The student arts-and-culture magazine that Pensacola State College administrators blocked from publication wasn’t a rogue faculty project. It was a fully student-driven class assignment that writing and graphic design students had been developing together for months, with the expectation—based on past precedent—that it would be printed and added to their portfolios.
That’s the account Casey Hignite gave me in an interview yesterday afternoon. Hignite, a PSC student whose work appears in Just Opposed—a title that’s a pun on “juxtaposed”—said the magazine grew out of a desire to show dimensions of Pensacola that people might not expect.
“We wrote about things that were relevant to us. They were conceptualized and developed entirely by the students—about topics relevant to their culture. And that was the goal of this magazine in the first place.”
The project was an interdepartmental collaboration between journalism and graphic design students, structured as a writing requirement. Students chose their own topics without faculty direction. Hignite noted that past arts and culture magazines had been published at PSC , and their teachers showed students previous examples of the publication.
- Students understood from the outset that the finished product would be printed.
The timeline raises uncomfortable questions for administrators. Hignite pointed out that writing and design students had been in contact throughout the entire project, with countless checkpoints along the way. The administration intervened only in the week before the magazine was set to go to print—after all the graded work had already been submitted.
- “It’s unreasonable for the college to state that publishing was never guaranteed,” Hignite said, “because all throughout this project we’ve had several indications that there’s been no issue in the past.”
According to a letter sent to the PSC administration by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), PSC’s Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs Brenda Kelly met with Mills on April 29 and blocked three student-written articles from publication, citing the Stop WOKE Act. The suppressed pieces included a profile of drag queen Vixen Valentine, a feature on the queer bookstore Perfect Day Books, and a story about Pensacola Poets.
- FIRE called the intervention an unconstitutional prior restraint and demanded that the college reverse course. Read FIRE Letter to Pensacola State College, May 1, 2026.
Hignite pushed back on the college’s framing that the objections were content-neutral, noting that the censorship reached beyond LGBTQ+ topics and included an article about a student’s experience with racism, which was also cited as grounds for pulling funding.
“What does it say about Pensacola State College that a student discussing the racism he experiences not only won’t be spared funding, but that it would be revoked in specific citation of his work? That’s ridiculous.”
The students are now exploring independent funding options—including a potential Kickstarter campaign—to get the magazine printed on their own.
- The production budget PSC had allocated was approximately $800 for a run of 100 copies. Hignite and her fellow contributors are working with the graphic designers to find an alternative path to publication.