A U.S. Court of Appeals ruled last week that administrators at public universities do not have the legal power to censor their schools' student newspapers, even when they provide them with financial support.
The ruling, handed down by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, invalidated the claims made by the dean of Governor's State University that the controversial ruling in the case of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier applied to college newspapers.
The 1988 Hazelwood decision stated that administrators in public high schools have broad powers in censoring or approving the content of their school's student papers before they are printed.
However, last week, the court ruled that "the differences between a college and a high school are far greater than the obvious differences in curriculum and extracurricular activities" and that public colleges were not subject to any restrictions on their First Amendment rights.
While this latest ruling is not seen as particularly groundbreaking, it does stray from previous decisions on the subject in that it explicitly states that the Hazelwood ruling does not apply to colleges, according to Executive Director of the Student Press Law Center Mark Goodman.
Nonetheless, Goodman still called the ruling "really important."
"I can't get away from the feeling that college students dodged a bullet here," he said. "Had the ruling gone the other way, it would have had dire consequences."
Despite its application to public universities, the ruling will not have much effect on private institutions like Penn, even if the student newspaper is not financially independent of the university administration. Private colleges do not enjoy the same constitutionally guaranteed freedoms as public ones.
"This case will probably have no direct impact on Penn," Goodman said.
However, he added that the decision could benefit private colleges peripherally by putting additional anti-censorship pressure on administrators.
"It sends a message that the censorship of student media is inappropriate and unacceptable," even in cases where it is not technically illegal, he said.
Goodman also mentioned that the case was unique in that "there wasn't really a single story" that promoted the lawsuit, unlike in most censorship cases.
"It was just an ongoing feeling on the part of the administration that the students were covering them in a way they didn't like," Goodman said.
