[Mb-civic] Wronging student rights - Greg Lukianoff - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Wronging student rights

By Greg Lukianoff  |  September 3, 2005

AS SUMMER ends and college students return to campus, a number of 
dreadful court decisions may cause them to wonder if their rights have 
taken a permanent vacation.

While the past decades have hardly been a golden age for student rights, 
there was good reason to be optimistic in recent years. Speech codes 
fell at colleges from New York to California, the Department of 
Education finally clarified that ''harassment" does not mean just being 
offended, and Texas Tech University had to admit that its lone 
20-foot-wide ''free speech gazebo" was inadequate space for its 28,000 
students to enjoy their First Amendment rights.

Maybe it was too good to last. The summer of 2005 will be remembered as 
a rough season for student rights. The worst legal decision of the 
summer was Hosty v. Carter. In Hosty, the Seventh Circuit Court of 
Appeals ruled that a dean who demanded prepublication review of a 
student newspaper at Governors' State University in Illionois -- because 
the administration did not like its content -- is not liable for her 
brazen act of censorship. If this were all the decision said, it would 
still be wrong; legal scholars have long understood that free speech 
means, at a minimum, that state officials cannot require publications to 
get state approval before publishing. Then, perhaps unsatisfied with 
ignoring only one principle of First Amendment law, the court decided 
that Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), in which the Supreme Court ruled 
that a public high school had substantial control over the content of a 
student newspaper produced as part of a journalism class, also applied 
to universities.

Applying Hazelwood to colleges ignores more than 30 years of court 
decisions granting strong protection to collegiate student media. It 
disregards the fact that 99 percent of college students are adults, as 
opposed to high school, where most are minors. It discredits the special 
importance of academic freedom at universities. It dismisses the idea 
that students' speech should not be as restricted in extracurriculars as 
it is in the classroom. And in Hosty, it discounts the fact the college 
contractually promised not to censor the paper!

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/03/wronging_student_rights/
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