Editorial: TPN wishes the Hazelwood lawsuit a not-so-happy birthday

Jan. 13 marked the 25th anniversary of the landmark Supreme Court case Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, in which the court ruled in favor of a high school administration in censoring a student newspaper. The case set a new precedent for student journalism censorship cases and, indeed, many other cases of free speech versus censorship in schools and even colleges.

Prior to the Hazelwood case in 1988, the precedent for censorship cases was the Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District case, in which courts ruled that school administrations could only censor publications if there was legitimate concern that a published piece would cause significant in-school disruption. Using the Tinker case as a precedent, many later censorship cases favored students and prioritized free speech over the administration’s priorities.

This decision, at the least, drastically increased the amount of censorship in American public schools. According to an educational document released by the Student Press Law Center, an organization that assists school and college newspapers in legal cases, calls to the SPLC asking for assistance in censorship-related cases increased 350 percent between 1988 and 2003.

However, the Hazelwood case changed the standard to give administrators power to censor information that presents “legitimate pedagogical concerns.” True and accurate articles critiquing schools or about educational policy have been subject to legal censorship because the Court decided that when students use the paper provided by the school — paid for by the public’s tax dollars — as a “forum,” the First Amendment loses its authority.

Troublingly, Hazelwood is being applied even more broadly than K-12 journalism education. It has been applied, in some situations, to college newspapers and yearbooks. For example, in 1998, Kentucky State University revoked yearbooks from stands because of stylistic elements and attempted to control newspaper content, citing Hazelwood. And in 2012, a foreign exchange student was suspended from SUNY-Oswego over a misstep in an email interview for a journalism class. In another case, a 16-year-old high school student was kicked out of her high school’s cheerleading squad for quietly refusing to participate in a cheer that celebrated a football player who had allegedly raped her. This broad denial of free speech is clearly detrimental to students by allowing administrators to overstep boundaries.

The main emphasis of education should be to encourage students to think independently — and giving school or college administrations broad rights to censor their newspapers’ content or to penalize students who demonstrate free speech inhibits independence in a way that fundamentally undermines what education in a democratic society should be.

While we understand the importance of upholding media ethics, avoiding libel and publishing articles that are truthful and in good taste, administrators should not have the power to make decisions in these areas. At the high school level, a newspaper adviser plays a strong role in providing guidance in media ethics, truthful and balanced reporting and approving the final product. Yet one of the ramifications of Hazelwood is friction between high school administrators and newspaper advisers.

Hazelwood’s implications and extremely broad applications are highly troubling to those who value free speech — therefore, we should return to the Tinker standard. Maintaining students’ rights to freedom of expression should become the new standard in evaluating censorship cases.