Off-Campus Speech

If I've said it once I've said it a million times--schools have no business trying to regulate the off-campus speech of their students. Universities have even less business trying to regulate the speech of their students, who are mostly adults, but some still try:

Hard cases, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes cautioned in a 1904 Supreme Court opinion, make bad law. What ­Holmes meant is that cases with distasteful facts and unlikeable parties tempt judges to back into the desired outcome without regard for the broader legal principles at stake. When that happens, future parties with more sympathetic cases become collateral damage.

Tatro v. University of Minnesota is one of those hard cases. If the justices of the Minnesota Supreme Court lose sight of the larger constitutional issues, the outcome in the case could give colleges virtually limitless authority to silence speech critical of their programs, no matter where it is uttered...

What is important about the Tatro case is not what Amanda said, but why the University of Minnesota believes it may regulate what students say on social-networking pages on their personal time...A speaker on school premises is talking exclusively to a school audience. On Facebook, the audience may include hundreds of outsiders. Enabling a college to dictate what is acceptable on Facebook means that it may interfere with messages that no student ever sees. What's more, speech on a social-networking page—unlike in a classroom—is entirely avoidable. Offended audience members may easily avert their eyes...

The ruling that colleges seek—that they may punish speech, on campus or off, that they deem likely to undermine donor support—should alarm all of us...

While colleges clearly may discipline students for off-campus criminal behavior, the idea that colleges have free-floating good-citizenship authority to punish lawful behavior that administrators subjectively deem "disruptive" is breathtaking in its potential for abuse...

If colleges genuinely believe that students' writing indicates violent intent, then the proper response is, of course, to investigate. But once the investigation is complete and the speech is found to be an unthreatening joke, discipline not only is unjustified, but self-defeating.

It's probably a bad idea, but sometimes I think that school and university administrators should be held personally liable when they so blatantly disregard the rights of students. Might that put a damper on these little martinets?