California student journalism advisers may soon be breathing easier if the state legislature passes a newly proposed state law, the Journalism Teacher Protection Act.

The bill, SB 1370, was introduced by California state Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco / San Mateo) who spoke today at the National College Newspaper Convention in San Francisco about his new bill designed to protect teachers from retaliation by administrators as a result of student speech.

The bill follows a 2006 law that Yee authored to prohibit administrators from censoring college publications and to protect students from being disciplined for engaging in controversial speech or press activities.

“What this bill will do is to prevent any administrator from exercising any retaliatory acts against any adviser of any newspaper in college or high school,” Yee said.

Teachers from around the state who had been dismissed or reassigned for condoning controversial student speech also shared their stories at the press conference. The instructors spoke of formal complaints and threats made to them, forgeries of their signatures on official documents, and even entire journalism programs being discontinued.

“Hearing these stories is very scary for me, and it’s not just scary for me on a personal level. Not so much that I’m going to lose my job, but I worry about the chilling affect that these kind of incidents can have on school newspapers around the state,” said Rachele Kanigel, an assistant professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. “When we hear about advisers getting threatened, fired, and reassigned it makes us all think, maybe we shouldn’t be letting our students run these stories.”

Many believe that the success of this bill is imperative to the future of journalism not only in schools, but in the real world as well.

“This is about the future of our country.” Yee said, “This is about the future of our culture and our society, and God help us if we somehow to begin to have a populace in the United States that somehow tempers, somehow restrains, somehow colors the way in which we hold our elected officials accountable and somehow shade things so that it’s a little bit better than it really is. Then we are in a deep, deep decline.”

The legislature will consider SB 1370 in March. According to a press release from Yee’s office, the bill is expected to easily pass in the State Legislature and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has already expressed his approval of the bill.

Voice reporters Wes Duplantier, Emily Merritt, Jason Park and Editor-in-Chief Michael Bloch contributed to this article.