Somes Lessons in Civics From the Hazelwood Case

The Supreme Court, in its Hazelwood School District decision last month, defended academic freedom against a lawsuit brought by high school students, but the vote was close and the decision has proved unpopular, especially among those who haven’t read it.

On May 13, 1983, two pages were excised from the final issue of Spectrum, the newspaper of Hazelwood East High School near St. Louis. The paper was published every three weeks or so, under the auspices of a journalism class, and was funded for the most part by the school board, which also paid the instructor and provided textbooks and supplies.

It was the job of the instructor to assign and edit stories as well as to determine the size and dates of the publication. The original instructor in the course had taken a job elsewhere, just as his class was preparing this school year’s final edition. So a substitute had taken over for him. As was the practice at Hazelwood East, the instructor delivered page proofs for the principal’s inspection shortly before the publication date.

The principal objected to the content of two articles. In order to meet what he thought would be the deadline for the last publishing run of the year, the principal consulted with the substitute instructor and then ordered that two whole pages of Spectrum be deleted, on which those two stories were to appear; this meant deleting other stories on those pages, although the principal stated no objection to them.

One article the principal found objectionable concerned divorce. A student had been named along with certain allegations she had made about her father, to which the father had been given no opportunity to respond.

The second article concerned sex among teen-agers. Here the principal had two objections: Although pseudonyms were used, the identities of three pregnant girls were nonetheless identifiable, and might prove embarrassing to them, their families and their boyfriends. Furthermore, the principal felt it inappropriate that this particular treatment of teen-age sex and birth-control appear in a paper also read by younger students. The principal testified he had no objection to other articles on those pages dealing with runaways, juvenile delinquency, teen-age marriage and a general piece on teen-age pregnancy.

Members of the journalism class sued their substitute teacher and the principal, together with the school district, alleging that their First Amendment rights were violated. The Federal District Court turned down the suit. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court’s decision. The Supreme Court on Jan. 13 decided for the school district, in a split decision, 5-3.

I applaud the Supreme Court’s verdict and its majority opinion. What I find distressing is that three justices voted against the school district. The shrill voice of Justice William J. Brennan Jr.’s dissenting opinion, along with Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry A. Blackmun who joined with him, does not serve our Constitution well nor education in the classroom. It’s a case of crying “fire!” in a crowded theater or, more precisely, a case of crying “wolf!”

Justice Brennan claims that the school principal “violated the First Amendment’s prohibitions.” And Brennan raises the ugly specter of Orwellian “thought police,” accusing the court majority of approving “brutal censorship.” Brennan even suggests that the principal should be fired: “Such unthinking contempt for individual rights is intolerable from any state official.” Brennan calls it “thought control” and “camouflage(d) viewpoint discrimination,” and offers the suggestion that this might lead to “enclaves of totalitarianism” in our public schools.

That a justice on the Supreme Court should write in such a panicked voice while remaining strangely silent on the rights of other individuals involved, such as the castigated father, the pregnant students or even the instructor of the class, makes nonsense out of common sense. It can also make us hard of hearing, when our First Amendment rights are really threatened.

Legally, it was a question whether the Spectrum constituted a public forum, the way a public park or school cafeteria can be. In a 1969 decision, Tinker vs. Des Moines, the court had argued reasonably enough that even on school premises students had their First Amendment rights, just as if they were in a public forum, provided that there was no material disruption, disorder or invasion of the rights of others. The appellate court extended this decision to the Hazelwood case and found that censoring those two articles would have been justified “only if publication of the articles should have resulted in tort liability to the school.” The appellate court believed no such liability could have been maintained--assuming all along that teachers could foresee this in this day and age. The appellate court invoked the Tinker precedent to overturn the case.

The Supreme Court majority opinion argued that there was a crucial difference between the toleration of free speech, as the Tinker case required, and promoting a particular student point of view within a defined curricular activity. Neither the teacher of Journalism II nor the principal nor the school district were under any obligation to accede to student wishes, if they found good reason not to, according to their best judgment as educators. And the court found they acted reasonably.

Had the minority opinion held sway, few would find it prudent to be the instructor of such a journalism class, since the instructor would not know what he could or could not edit. And that minority opinion might well have furthered the flight of teachers from the classroom, all in the name of the First Amendment. The teacher would have lost the right to teach his class as he saw fit, and the school board would have lost editorial control over the newspaper it owned.

Justice Brennan asks what sort of civics lesson this is for our students, to censor or edit their school paper, and that question is well worth asking. Let me ask some other questions: What sort of civics lesson is it to award academic credit, grades and class time to high school students for producing a school newspaper, to hire an instructor to do the hard work for them and finally to pay for these activities out of precious school funds, making the school district fully liable for the final product? Is that the way the real world works? Why cannot high school students produce their own entirely self-supporting paper, establishing their own forum and taking full responsibility for what they write and print? After all, it’s been done before.

One could, of course, try a different tactic, as we do in California, by legislating editorial policies and spelling out in advance the circumstances for censoring a school paper. I find this approach invasive, since our schools are already overregulated and overburdened with administrators. The Supreme Court would apparently agree with me: “To require such regulations in the context of a curricular activity could unduly constrain the ability of educators to educate.” Especially with the advent of desk-top publishing, there is no reason why students cannot publish newspapers entirely--even cheaply--on their own. Perhaps one reason why school papers are instead published so often through the classrooms is that most students are too apathetic to do it on their own.

The court’s minority opinion strikes me as a case of condescending to juveniles. We like to tell sweet stories to our children about the American Way of Life. We encourage them to practice this in other people’s homes and schools. But the stories we tell them are always slightly skewed. In our public schools we set up artificial laboratories of assorted freedoms, with the details of the real world conveniently left out, such as the need of a newspaper to raise its own revenues and be responsible for what it publishes.

In this way we teach our students to accept their freedoms passively, rather than take active charge of them themselves. We yield to an adolescence which typically demands privileges from parents and others in a position of authority without at the same accepting corresponding obligations. I prefer my freedoms neat, not watered down with diminished responsibilities, and I think it is rational to expect this of our youth. Instead of crying in a courtroom that their rights were wronged, wouldn’t it have been better for these students to have published their own paper in the first place?

Let our teachers teach and by all means let our students do their thing. But there is no compelling reason to require that both parties always share exactly the same space and time to accomplish all their diverse ends. A teacher cannot teach if each of his students is perfectly entitled to his own opinions--say, that 2 + 2 makes 5.

Of course students are covered by the Bill of Rights--but let them learn that these rights bring corresponding responsibilities. If students wish to have their own newspaper, then they should also be obliged to publish it themselves, to raise the money for it, to get it printed and distributed and to be fully accountable for what is written in it. That is what the First Amendment means.