If any institution is going to defend the freedom of speech, it is a newspaper. Reporting the news and printing various opinions often rely upon the First Amendment guarantees set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
And yet ... however ... but still ... an 8-1 U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week on the free-speech rights of high school students has a troublesome element to it.
The court’s ruling, in favor of a 14-year-old Pennsylvania girl who let loose with a vulgar Snapchat rant because she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading squad, is an emphatic defense of student free speech rights off campus.
The justices may not have said so directly, but the nature of this case essentially prevents public schools from holding students accountable for almost anything they say, no matter how objectionable.
At a convenience store on a Saturday, the teen posted an image of herself and a friend with middle fingers raised. Her writing with the picture cursed school, softball, cheerleading and “everything.”
When the school’s cheerleading coach found out, he suspended the girl from the junior varsity squad. Her parents filed a federal lawsuit, but a lower court ordered her reinstated, saying that off-campus speech was beyond the school’s authority to punish. The school appealed all the way to the nation’s highest court.
This is slippery turf, and the justices seemed to know it when they heard arguments in the case in April. In a landmark 1969 ruling, the court upheld the First Amendment right of five students to wear black armbands to school as a silent protest against the Vietnam War. This time, the question before the court was whether a school can punish off-campus speech.
It’s easy to come up with hypothetical examples of student speech that might be punished. Justice Elena Kagan suggested one during arguments: Would a website set up by high school boys to rank female classmates’ appearance and sexual availability be protected speech?
That’s a good question, and while it’s clear that the court had no desire to set free-speech limits, the unavoidable fact of this week’s ruling is that Kagan’s hypothetical website just might be protected — until the parents of the girls being ranked get involved.
Justice Stephen Breyer’s ruling specifically said that a school’s “regulatory interests remain significant in some off-campus circumstances.” But if a 14-year-old who is old enough to know better cannot be held accountable for a public cursing festival, then it would be interesting to know exactly what speech schools can legally regulate.
To repeat: First Amendment free speech rights are important, even for students. But being punished for bad behavior and learning from your mistakes are important concepts, too. So the true lesson of this episode has less to do with free speech and more to do with the notion that the judges got it right when they left this young lady off the cheerleading squad.
