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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 28, 1988)
aWMMMMM slwood.: ase of Rights v. Wrong? 7 either he nor The Fancf s editor, )r Kate Nowak, believe the ?/wood decision will have any t on their school activities. Dwak says the Lake Highlands t School principal trusts dson and the staff and has never ed at the paper prior to its ication. She says he would lably never try to prevent them i running a story, f he did, he’d have a very good an to,” she says. >hn Cutsinger, journalism her at Westlake High School in in and former adviser of the rd-winning Featherduster, says possibility that the same rationale used in the Hazelwood case could also be applied to public colleges and universities, since college papers may be seen as an academic instrument rather than a public forum for ideas. “Let’s just say that the collegiate press is much closer to the scholastic press than to the professional press,” he says. “It will be in the same boat as we’re in.” Goodman expresses the same concern. “It’s unfortunate that the rationale and the speech the justices used don’t suggest it (the Hazelwood subject matter not appropriate for many of the children in his school would be fine for college students. “Half of my kids are too young to drive,” he says. Katzenstein from the ACLU doesn’t believe Hazelwood will affect college publications either, but its potential is threatening, he says. “I think it has some scary implications,” Katzenstein says. Dr. Douglas Starr, head of the Journalism Department at A&M, sees the Hazelwood decision as more of a shifting of authority than as a compromise of students’ rights. He says he has no objections to an High School’s newspaper adviser Sandy Farris discusses the paper’s layout ideas with her malism class. )mpletely disagrees with the ;ion, although he’s sure ?/wood won’t affect his school, some districts, however, he administrators will use their ?r to censor beyond newspapers )ossibly into theater productions brary books. itsinger also points out the decision) couldn’t be applied to colleges or universities,” he says. Principal Reynolds says the rationale should not be extended to colleges because of the age difference between college and high school students. He says some giving a high school principal authority over his or her school’s newspaper because he or she is held responsible for everything in the paper. Using the same reasoning, Starr says, a president of a college or university may be in a situation where he or she must take responsibility for a newspaper’s articles without having any authority over the paper’s production. Starr says the president or administrator in such a situation should have the same power over a collegiate paper as the publisher has over a professional paper. “I am a devout believer in the First Amendment, ” Starr says. “However, there are restrictions on freedom. “The one who has the press has the freedom, not the reporter. The question is who owns the press. ” Tomlinson says it is difficult to predict whether the Hazelwood rationale will ever be extended to colleges and universities, given the broad wording of the majority opinion. But he also says some administrators may try to use the open-ended decision to their advantage, going beyond newspapers and censoring other forms of expression. He says that judges will definitely consider Hazelwoods precedent in future cases dealing with student rights. If Tinker were to be decided by the Supreme Court today instead of in the more liberal Supreme Court of 1969, Tomlinson says, even black armbands might be legally prohibited by school officials. “I find great difficulty in justifying a decision which, to me, says freedom of expression only exists when you get to be an adult.” Tomlinson says. Kuhlmeier, now a senior advertising major at Southeast Missouri State University, says she never expected her newspaper’s conflict with Reynolds to inflate into a lawsuit, much less reach the Supreme Court. She believes Hazelwood has damaged the precedent set by Tinker. However, she says she hasn’t let the disappointment drag her down because she knows many people and organizations were behind her, and still are. She says it’s only a matter of time before another similar case gets to court and a ruling in favor of students is handed down. But Kuhlmeier has no regrets concerning Hazelwood. “I believed in it, ” she says. “I still do, whether win or lose. ”
