New Delhi, April 1: On bulletin boards that line the main corridor of St. Stephen's College, posters announce one of the biggest days in the institution's annual calendar: the college dramatics club, the Shakespeare Society, presents its yearly production on Wednesday.

But pinned to a wall, right next to one of the bulletin boards bearing posters of Coriolanus, the Shakespearean tragedy the club performed today evening, is a stern warning from the college principal: all club activities must cease for the academic year on April 1.

It's a warning that may appear almost school-like.

Yet, it captures a struggle St. Stephen's, one of the country's best-known undergraduate colleges, has long grappled with, and one it is waging again in balancing two values the institution cherishes: freedom of expression and a strict notion of "discipline."

The latest chapter of that struggle opened last week after St. Stephen's principal Valson Thampu ordered a group of four students to stop an online magazine because they had not waited for him to vet an interview he had given them.

The block on the magazine - called E-zine - came close on the heels of the Supreme Court judgment scrapping Section 66A of the Information Technology Act that was misused by politicians against citizens who criticised them online.

Thampu's decision has incensed sections of the college's alumni community, prompting some of them to publicly articulate concerns.

"I have written to the principal, advising him as a friend, that banning free speech, whatever the provocation, will prove counterproductive for the college," former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi, who is also vice-chairman of the college's alumni association trust, told The Telegraph. "I've requested him to reconsider the decision."

Neither Thampu nor the four students who began the online magazine were available for comment.

But conversations and emails they have shared with members of the alumni and comments from other senior college officials point to the tussle between the college's desire to maintain what it views as discipline and the freedom of expression the students believe they are entitled to.

In email responses to alumni who have voiced their concern, Thampu has contended that "college discipline cannot be taken lightly".

The four students had obtained the college's permission to start the magazine, and Thampu had agreed to an interview. But the principal had set a condition: before publication, the version of the interview that would appear should be shown to him.

The students did so. But when Thampu did not respond for a few hours, they published the interview.

"This is a disciplinary issue, very clearly," said Sanjay Rao Ayde, a political science professor at St. Stephen's, who is heading a one-man inquiry panel set up by Thampu on the incident. "My terms of reference are clear - and they involve deciding whether there was a disciplinary breach."

Ayde said he had spoken to three students and would file his report after speaking to the fourth.

Three of the four students have apparently told Thampu that they were against going public with their concerns over the restriction on the magazine and wanted to settle the dispute within the college.

Thampu has also said he may allow the magazine to resume, based on Ayde's report.

"There's no ban, that's a misrepresentation," Ayde said. "The principal has made it clear he will review his decision after my report."

Thampu isn't the first St. Stephen's principal to be accused of stifling freedom of expression at the college.

In 2003, at the start of the US invasion of Iraq, Thampu's predecessor, the late Anil Wilson, stopped students sitting on the college lawns from painting posters against the then American President, George W. Bush. Wilson also tried to prevent a march against the invasion - but eventually allowed it.

The college has an equally rich history in iconoclastic humour - from 1966 till 1985, St. Stephen's had what was the world's only Wodehouse Society, dedicated to British author P.G. Wodehouse.

The society, with a pig-tail drawn on its letterhead, would organise an annual impersonation competition, where one year actor Benjamin Gilani famously mimicked faculty members.

"I know there's this balance the college needs to strike," Quraishi said. "This ban has only highlighted the need for that balance."