Rabelais Student Media is a student newspaper at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, named for French Renaissance writer François Rabelais.
From its founding in 1967, Rabelais Student Media has been run as a department of the La Trobe University Student Representative Council (now the La Trobe Student Union). The paper is funded by a combination of advertising revenue and a student levy. Editors are elected annually and serve for a single year.
Rabelais has a notorious history in the Australian legal world. The July 1995 edition of the magazine published an article which allegedly incited readers to shoplift as a means of surviving student poverty. This edition was subsequently banned by the Office of Film and Literature Classification and the editors of the magazine charged with publishing, distributing and depositing an objectionable publication. In this instance an objectional publication was defined as one that allegedly incited criminal activity. The editors lodged an appeal, which led to a protracted four-year court case. The appeal was eventually defeated by the full bench of the Federal Court, who refused the editors application to appeal to the High Court of Australia. The criminal charges were dropped in March 1999. On campus, the paper is known for casting a critical eye over the actions of the Union and the University at large.
After many different formats and regime changes over the years, Rabelais is published monthly during the school year (March to November) and has a circulation of approx 9,000. This year (2011) the publication has adopted a more informal magazine style, while still keeping the format of a newspaper. There is more content about music, movies, books, student life and fashion.
Read more about Rabelais Student Media: Editors of Rabelais, Rabelais Women's Editions, Student Media At La Trobe
Famous quotes containing the words rabelais, student and/or media:
“Misery is the company of Lawsuits.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.”
—Michel de Certeau (1925–1986)