Censorship as a Lesson

The U.S. Supreme Court brushed aside perfectly good law this week having to do with the right of high-school officials to limit free speech to maintain order or to protect student rights. In its place the court spelled out what seems to be not just a right to censor but an obligation to do so.

Writing for a 5-3 majority, Justice Byron R. White reversed an appeals court finding that Robert E. Reynolds--the principal of a suburban high school in Missouri, Hazelwood East--overstepped his authority when he ordered that two articles be dropped from a school newspaper, the Spectrum.

Attorneys for Reynolds argued that he censored one article on the effect of divorce on children in a broken family and another on teen-age pregnancy as a means of protecting the privacy of parents or students who were involved in the articles.

Protecting the “rights of others” has been a ground for prohibiting the full exercise of free speech in a school setting for nearly two decades under a Supreme Court decision in the case of Tinker vs. Des Moines School District. The court could have found in Tinker all the authority that the Hazelwood principal needed to stifle the stories. Clearly the court wanted to go beyond that.

For example, White wrote that the principal could have concluded on reading the story about divorce and the one about teen-age pregnancy that the editors and writers of Spectrum still had a lot to learn about privacy and ethics. That line makes censorship not an intrusion on the mind but simply another form of a failing grade.

Ethics, the importance of a citizen’s privacy and the ability to distinguish between good taste and bad are essential parts of a journalist’s education. But so are learning to be creative and curious. And trashing what young writers and editors produce in concert with a faculty adviser, as was the case with Spectrum, can scarcely be dignified by the name teaching.

In a dissenting opinion Justice William J. Brennan Jr. said that Reynolds “violated the First Amendment’s prohibitions against censorship of any student expression that neither disrupts classwork nor invades the rights of others.”

It could be that the court was only trying to say that the right of free speech carries with it a duty to be responsible in the way it is exercised. That would be difficult to argue with, but the opinion does not say that, nor is it what one teacher at Hazelwood heard the court say.

The journalism teacher heard two things. One was a welcome invitation to pass the buck on tough decisions--not exactly the kind of model that one wants for aspiring reporters and editors, or for any other profession or craft. More distressing was the teacher’s other reading of what the court wrote: “I’ve always believed that freedom of the press extends as far as the ownership of that press.” That’s a bit cryptic for our taste, but it seems to say that people who own newspapers decide what the First Amendment means--an outrageous construct. It also is good reason to cheer the part of Brennan’s dissent in which he said: “The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson, but not the one the court teaches them today.”