The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a blow to students’ First Amendment rights by refusing to hear an appeal of Hosty v. Carter – a 2000 ruling that authorized university administrators to censor publications by students.
The case arose after three student reporters for The Innovator student newspaper at Governors State University in Illinois refused to allow the university’s dean to review issues of the paper prior to publication. The dean, Patricia Carter, had demanded to review the newspapers before print after the reporters wrote articles criticizing the university’s administration.
After a district court and later a three-judge panel of the appellate court ruled in favor of the students, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed the rulings. The judges said the 1988 Supreme Court ruling in
Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which gave censorship rights to high school administrators, applied to public universities’ publications as well. The students appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Court refused to hear the case. So in the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin), the same laws that apply to high school newspapers apply to colleges as well.
Thankfully the ruling does not affect independent student publications, like the Emerald, which are not financed by universities. However, the ruling does set a dangerous precedent and threaten the future of professional journalism.
As the judges who wrote the dissenting opinion to the Seventh Circuit Court’s ruling aptly stated, “Not only is there a distinction between college and high school students themselves, the missions of the two institutions are quite different.” Although high schools are “concerned with the ‘inculcation’ of ‘values’,” a university’s purpose is “to expose students to a ‘marketplace of ideas,’” according to the judges. Foremost, high school and college journalists, on average, have drastically different levels of skill and experience; equating the two is a travesty. Whereas younger students may not have journalism classes, college journalists often have access to both classes and professional internships.
One important function of college newspapers is to teach journalists how to work in a fully operational newsroom so they will be prepared to work for larger professional publications after graduating. Subjecting college newspapers to prior review and other forms of censorship by administrators conflicts with this goal. One of the media’s most important functions in society is to act as a watchdog on entities that affect the public. Without journalists, governments and institutions are more likely to get away with being corrupt and harmful to society; this principle applies to university administrations as well.
Dean Carter and the U.S. Supreme Court have sent the message to student reporters that administrations they criticize have the right to censor publications. This is a dangerous – and inaccurate – message. Raising a crop of journalists that don’t know how to properly fill their roles is a disservice to the public – a disservice that could result in corruption flying under the radar of journalists who were taught not to criticize.
The more closely college newsrooms reflect the real world, the more skilled and professional the journalists that emerge from them will be. We urge our colleagues at papers affected by this decision to continue exercising both their responsibilities of fairness and accuracy as journalists and their rights to operate independent of government censors. If future court cases regarding this issue arise, we hope other courts will exercise better judgment and not use the Hosty decision as a precedent.