ST PETER — On a chilly February weekend in St. Peter, dozens of high-achieving high schoolers and their parents mill about the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College. It is scholarship weekend. These are some of the college’s future student leaders.

At waist-level in nearly every building they enter — in newsracks that contain the student newspaper, the voice of the students — is the evidence of just how unscholarly and unacademic some of the college’s students were the weekend prior.

On the front page of the Gustavian Weekly an article chronicles the history of something called Case Day, a binge-drinking phenomenon in which participants attempt to consume an entire case of beer in 24 hours. If these high schoolers milling about end up matriculating at Gustavus, they’ll one day learn much more about Case Day.

This juxtaposition of ideas — visiting high schoolers, drunken college students — prompted a  act that some say was one of censorship, and others say was one of protest.

A group of students removed several hundred copies of the Weekly from the parts of campus where those high schoolers and their parents were and transplanted them to racks inside a few residence halls.

One of those students was Mary Cunningham, a senior from Maplewood who is also a member of the forensics team.

“I’m not ashamed of what I did,” Cunningham said. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. ... It was democracy at its finest.”

Employees from the Weekly filed a formal complaint against Cunningham. Removal of those newspapers, Weekly Editor Jacob Seamans says, is not democracy. It’s censorship.

Speaking out against an idea is one thing, Seamans said. But deciding for others that certain news content is too objectionable to be seen is taking the idea of protest too far.

The issues here are meaty ones.

First, the article. Seamans says he was proud of the report his staff writer put together. The article — which appeared under the headline “BEER. It’s what’s for breakfast ... and lunch ... and dinner” — quoted students, several anonymously, who reveled in the idea of an all-day party. Other students deplored the idea entirely. The city police chief and head of college security are quoted on the dangers and foolishness of excessive drinking.

“It was an opportunity for us to cover binge drinking in an interesting way and an important way,” Seamans said. “We gave (the writer) some time to work on this article and I thought it was incredibly well done, incredibly well balanced.”

It prompted lots of response.

“Some people were unhappy with our coverage,” Seamans said. “Some people were unhappy in the way it was covered, unhappy that we brought it up and they thought we were glorifying Case Day.”

Forensics coach Chris Kracht said, “The article is clearly biased, violates the school’s alcohol policy, it talks about Case Day in a positive manner and does not shed any light on the negativity associated with binge drinking.”

Others, Seamans said, thought the article gave the campus community an access point to discussing the controversial topic of binge drinking.

But the article is only half the issue. Because a few days after it came out, Cunningham decided her college newspaper, which gets a portion of her student fees, had gone too far.

First, she says, the photograph on the cover — which shows a glass of beer in the foreground, a Gustavus T-shirt-clad male in the background — violates a school policy prohibiting such displays in the Weekly.

Second, she said, having this article on newsstands the day all these future students were on campus sends the wrong message about the college.

“It did not accurately reflect Gustavus, and the vast majority of Gustavus students,” Cunningham said.

She said her mother told her that had this article been her first impression of Gustavus, she wouldn’t allow her daughter to attend.

Cunningham said when she removed the newspapers, she didn’t act alone; there were others. But only Cunningham openly told people what she did, and so when Seamans filed his complaint, he filed it against Cunningham. That triggered the college’s judicial process.

In most cases, the hearing to resolve a complaint is done in private. But Seamans wanted the hearing to be open, and Cunningham didn’t object, so anyone from the Gustavus community who wanted to attend could do so. The hearing attracted about 30 people, attendees said.

One of them was Dean of Students Jeff Stocco.

The Weekly, Stocco says, has “broad leeway” in terms of what it can publish. The administration, in other words, isn’t present during the news-gathering process and doesn’t prohibit the newspaper from publishing articles unflattering to the college.

But the college does have rules, one of which is that the Weekly is restricted in what it can and can’t do with regards to alcohol. Alcohol advertising is not allowed, nor is the promotion of the consumption of large amounts of alcohol.

“So, conceivably, you could charge the weekly with violation of our rules,” Stocco said. “That doesn’t make it right for an individual or individuals to remove copies from their distribution centers.”

Stocco says he, like Cunningham, wasn’t happy seeing a front-page article featuring a large stein of beer. But in a college environment where high-risk drinking has become a deadly topic, spurring dialogue on the topic isn’t the worst idea in the world.

“In some ways, the campus newspaper, you could argue, effectively or not effectively, raised awareness of college drinking,” Stocco said.

As for the hearing and the result, no one’s talking. Seamans, Cunningham and Associate Dean of Students Deirdre Rosenfeld, who presides over the college’s judicial process, each declined to say what happened at the hearing or what resulted from Seamans’ complaint.

Seamans just wants a written apology he could print in the Weekly — which he hasn’t gotten and doesn’t expect. Cunningham insists she’s done nothing wrong and says the Weekly, by nature of the formal complaint, is infringing her right to protest.

“It’s easy to look at it and assume that it’s censorship,” she said, “but that’s only if you don’t have the facts.”

There probably will be an appeal, though. Cunningham said that both parties were very stubborn with their positions and, no matter what way the hearing was going to turn out, the other seemed poised for an appeal.

“This was clearly a deeply felt and pretty significant conflict of opinion,” Rosenfeld said. “The two parties involved had very different viewpoints about what’s right.”