Anchorage Daily News

The Scout's newsroom usually buzzed with a bunch of us neophyte journalists publishing a biweekly paper for our suburban high school. But on one cold day in January 1988, we had something else on our minds besides college acceptance letters and prospective prom dates.

That day, the Supreme Court ruled that high school students did not share the same First Amendment rights of free expression as adults. Our adviser's wide blue eyes flashed with anger as she tried to explain what had happened in the Hazelwood School District outside St. Louis. The district was not unlike ours: suburban, middle class, full of young people who had been brought up to believe the government's protections extended to them.

But when the editors of the Spectrum at Hazelwood East High wrote one article about pregnant teens at their school and another about divorce, the principal objected to the articles and stripped them from the publication.

By a 5-3 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the principal's right to censor the paper, which was produced in a journalism class like the one in which we published the Scout.

Suddenly, the fulcrum supporting students' rights to free expression shifted. It was slight at first, and our adviser assured us that our principal and most high school administrators had no interest in meddling in student media. Before 1988, the courts had looked to a 1969 Supreme Court ruling that neither students nor teachers "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." After 1988, we were no longer running the student paper as the previous generation of students had: under the assumption that teenagers enjoyed the same First Amendment rights as adults.

Now, the high court said, a school could refuse to lend its name and resources to disseminate student expression it objected to, and that wasn't the same as punishing student expression that happens to occur on school grounds.

The majority held "that educators do not offend the First Amendment by exercising editorial control over the style and content of student speech in school-sponsored expressive activities so long as their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns."

That's given high school administrators wide latitude to censor publications, according to anecdotal information collected by the Student Press Law Center.

What's worse, high school students often produce papers that read more like public relations vehicles, writing puff pieces rather than practicing serious journalism by scrutinizing those in power and fostering public debate. They learn about the First Amendment in the abstract, but know they can't summon its powers to their side if they work for a school-sponsored publication. The result is that they emerge from high school with an anemic understanding of their constitutional rights and the craft of journalism.

Though the ruling applied only to high school publications, the shadow of that ruling looms over colleges.

In last year's "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" ruling, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas outlined in admiring terms a history in which students had no rights: "Teachers taught and students listened. Teachers commanded and students obeyed," he wrote. Stanley Fish, a law professor at Florida International University and a former college dean, endorsed this position in his New York Times blog last year: "Not only do students not have first amendment rights, they do not have any rights: they don't have the right to express themselves, or have their opinions considered, or have a voice in the evaluation of their teachers, or have their views of what should happen in the classroom taken into account. (And I intend this as a statement about college students as well as high-school students.)"

So, high school and college students, be bold in your practice of journalism to counteract the position of professor Fish and others who would undermine your right to free expression. Citizens interested in preserving the active press that is central to democracy can help by pushing for the kind of laws enacted by Arkansas, California, Colorado and other states that give students much stronger protection than Hazelwood.

Paola Banchero is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage where she advises the college paper, The Northern Light. She has also worked as an on-call copy editor at the Daily News.

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