1988 ruling still stifling student free speech

A 1988 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that students don’t have First Amendment protection when they write for school newspapers has become a “censorship tsunami” that lets school and college administrators shoot down anything they fear would tarnish the school or college’s images.

Over the years, it has tranquilized free speech far beyond journalism, secondary schools, school-sponsored speech, and print publications, says law professor Richard Peltz-Steele at University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The ruling had its roots at East Hazelwood High School in St. Louis, Mo., where the principal objected to stories produced by journalism students for the school newspaper on teen pregnancy and a classmate coping with her parents’ divorce. The principal said the stories were editorially unsound and unfit for an adolescent audience.

Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank LoMonte said the Hazelwood ruling is used routinely to defend such things as:

Auburn University at Montgomery removing a 51-year-old graduate student from its nursing program for speaking out about disciplinary policies.

  

Chicago’s Stevenson High School banning a school newspaper story about an anonymous student discussing the ease of obtaining drugs on campus.

The effect has been chilling on challenging school censorship. There has been no such lawsuit in five years.

There was even an unsuccessful attempt to justify censorship of a student’s Facebook page under the Hazelwood ruling by the University of Minnesota.

Says LeMonte: “It’s disheartening to see anyone censored, but it’s doubly disheartening when people are so frightened and intimidated that they won’t even speak up about it.”