Conference brings attention to digital First Amendment issues

By Curt Hazlett
Special to J-Ideas

CHICAGO – Online innovations such as social-networking sites and weblogs are providing today’s students with new ways of communicating, but they are also creating potential conflicts over freedom of expression in schools, according to participants at a McCormick Tribune Foundation conference titled Free Speech in Schools.

The conference, organized by Ball State’s J-Ideas program and held Oct. 18-20 in the downtown Freedom Museum, brought together 42 participants with a strong interest in freedom of expression in schools, including First Amendment scholars, teachers, administrators and students. Topics included First Amendment law in the digital age, the impact of Internet filtering on schools and libraries, and the ways in which dramatic changes in traditional media have reshaped the ways in which students express their ideas.

“We covered some important ground at the meeting,” said Warren Watson, the J-Ideas director who developed the program for McCormick Tribune. “Young people enjoy First Amendment rights around free speech. But those rights are being challenged in the information age.”
Of particular interest to the participants is the impact on scholastic free speech of such social-networking sites as MySpace, Facebook and Xanga, where members can post personal information and photos for online viewing. Critics say the sites can harbor sexual predators and be misused by those who anonymously post fraudulent information about others.

To prevent access to those sites and others, many schools and libraries have installed Internet filters on their computers. Questions also have been raised whether schools can punish students who misuse the sites, even though that misuse takes place off campus.

But a number of participants noted that social-networking sites provide students with a new method for exchanging ideas, and that those who want to restrict their use should be aware of their value.

“You read a lot about the dangers of MySpace, but you need to remember the potential,” noted participant Mark Goodman, the executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Alexandria, Va. “There is more at risk by not encouraging student expression than by encouraging it.”

The discussions took place against a backdrop of concern that students’ First Amendment rights are being eroded by a lack of understanding on the part of school administrators, especially when it comes to the limits of their jurisdiction.

A landmark 1968 Supreme Court decision, Tinker v. Des Moines School District, held that the right to free expression doesn’t end at the schoolhouse door. Twenty years later, the high court restricted that right in its Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier ruling, which held that schools have the right to restrict “disruptive” speech. Now the court has been asked to hear a case in which an Alaska student was punished for displaying a banner off campus that a school administrator found objectionable.

Constitutional law scholar and journalist Linda Monk told the gathering that the crucial question now is how much power school administrators have in controlling students’ speech. “To say to a student that essentially there is no limit to our jurisdiction over you would be the death of the First Amendment,” she said.

New media issues complicate the situation even further, leading Watson, the conference moderator, to ask, “Do the rights of students stop at one end of an Internet connection?”

Based on the conference discussions, the McCormick Tribune Foundation plans to produce a resource guide early in 2007 that will help students and educators better understand the First Amendment.

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