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ACTA signs onto Hosty brief
ACTA has joined a range of organizations--among them Coalition for Student & Academic Rights, Feminists for Free Expression, Ifeminists.net, the National Association of Scholars, and Students for Academic Freedom--in signing a FIRE-authored friend-of-the-court brief urging the Supreme Court to hear an appeal of Hosty v Carter. This is an enormously important case for campus speech; it has wide-reaching implications not only for the freedom of the student press, but also for the expressive and associative freedom of student fee-sponsored student groups.
Hosty v Carter originates in a dispute between Governors State University administrators and the student staff of the university-funded campus paper, The Innovator. In 2000, Governors State administrator Patricia Carter demanded the right to review the content of The Innovator before publication, with the intention of preventing it from publishing criticism of the Governors State administration. The paper's staff cried censorship; the administration cited the fact that the paper receives funding from mandatory student fees to justify its desire to control the paper's content. Led by Margaret Hosty, editor of The Innovator, the paper's staff sued the university for violating its expressive rights--and lost in a Seventh Circuit appellate ruling that defies logic and sets a dangerous precedent for the future of the student press.
In the Seventh Circuit ruling, the appellate court found that Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, which allows high schools to regulate the content of student media, applies to colleges--even though the vast majority of college students are adults who enjoy First Amendment protections, even though a free student press is a crucial component of higher education's ability to foster and maintain a campus atmosphere of free inquiry and intellectual vitality, and even though the Supreme Court has been quite clear that student fee-sponsored groups at public colleges and universities have full First Amendment protection.
In a press release issued yesterday, ACTA president Anne D. Neal noted that "If allowed to stand, the Hosty decision poses a serious threat to the free exchange of ideas on our college campuses and wrongly appropriates high school guidelines to the college and university context. ... At a time when robust debate on campus is too often threatened by campus thought police, this case risks undermining even further the right and ability of college students to express their viewpoints."
Hosty has been overshadowed by media coverage of Rumsfeld v FAIR, which the Supreme Court will begin hearing in December. But it's nonetheless an extraordinarily urgent case, one that ought to take its place alongside the Supreme Court's other landmark rulings about the associative and expressive freedom of student organizations receiving funding from student fees: Rosenberger v University of Virginia (1995) and University of Wisconsin Board of Regents v Southworth (2000).
The brief is concise, clear, and impeccably argued. Read it here.
Posted by acta online at October 27, 2005 08:28 AM
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