Editors everywhere have spent the last few weeks deciding how to report on the firestorm of often violent protests over cartoons of Muhammad that were published in several European newspapers. The media response has been almost as complex and disquieting as the maelstrom itself. The central question editors faced was whether to publish the cartoons that inspired this outrage. Many shied away. Locally, The Boston Globe refused to print them, shrinking from the task for the sake of "tolerance." Meanwhile, the alternative weekly, The Boston Phoenix, took an oddly upfront, but possibly overblown, approach by printing an empty black box alongside the editorial and saying the paper felt intimidated by "radical and bloodthirsty Islamists."

"As we feel forced, literally, to bend to maniacal pressure, this may be the darkest moment in our 40-year publishing history," The Phoenix wrote.

At least six college newspapers have entered the fray by printing the cartoons. There is a temptation to say, as The Phoenix did this week, "Score one for uppity, principled 22-year-olds."

But exactly what principles led college papers to publish these cartoons?

Since the resignation of several editors from the national paper The New York Press to protest their publisher's decision to yank the cartoons from an issue about the controversy, printing the cartoons-or fighting to do so-has stopped being about the violence in Europe, and has become merely an assertion of the sanctity of the First Amendment. Such assertions are expected from college publications like the conservative Harvard Salient-one of the six in the country to print the cartoons-whose editorial mission includes an ideological stance.

But that cannot be said for other university papers whose general interest content and representative coverage make them forums and sources of news for communities that extend over ideological borders-papers like The Daily Illini at the University of Illinois.

Under the guise of stirring discourse about the passionate and bloody reaction, the Illini's cavalier editor in chief and opinion editor published six of the 12 cartoons. But by fanning the flames of controversy, they rendered their opinion section unable to create the very discourse that they sought to engender. The issue argued in its pages-and on campus-became not about this serious global conflict, but about whether The Daily Illini made the right decision in printing the cartoons.

It was now personalized-it became about that newspaper's decision and that campus's reaction.

Initially, the decision of whether to publish was a tug-of-war between smarting the already wounded sensibilities of Muslims and a feeling that the public should see what exactly was causing this crisis.

But it has become something else: a diversion from the real story.

You will not see these cartoons in our pages. Originally, we reasoned that although there would come a point at which talking about something without showing it would be ridiculous, our coverage did not reach that point.

Now, it's because printing the cartoons has become part of the story. And, in order to cover that story and in order for our community members to comment on it freely-we need to keep our distance.