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Columnist needs to ask for tuition back
Your columnist, Michael O’Connor, is entitled to voice his opinion as to whether the proposed Burleson High School yearbook article about teen motherhood is appropriate for a high school audience. However, Mr. O’Connor’s March 13 column crosses the line of harmless opinion and purports to convey as fact Mr. O’Connor’s uninformed belief as to the law governing school censorship. Because students may read Mr. O’Connor’s poorly researched column and take away a false impression of their rights, some clarification is in order.
Mr. O’Connor’s column betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment. That Mr. O’Connor’s editors may correct or withhold his columns — a right they regrettably failed to exercise here — is in no way analogous to a school setting. A school principal is a state official, and a state official may not use the power of the state to censor indiscriminately, any more than the mayor of Cleburne could tell Mr. O’Connor what to write in his column.
To be quite clear that there is no misunderstanding, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hazlewood cannot rationally be interpreted as giving schools a free hand to dictate the content of student publications at will. Even under the most permissive of Hazelwood standards, it is the burden of the school administrator to point to a legitimate educational justification before censoring. That the principal’s telephone might ring a few times with irate calls from members of the community is not, in any court in America, a legitimate educational justification. Indeed the “educational message conveyed by Burleson’s policy is that journalist should refrain from publishing information they know to be truthful and relevant to their readers out of fear that some will find the information upsetting. If this is the type of journalism education that Mr. O’Connor received in school, he should ask for his tuition back.
Reputable professional journalists understand that courage in the face of opposition from authority is fundamental to the practice of good journalism, and for that matter, the practice of good American citizenship. It is the student editors of Burleson High who are the teachers here, and no matter what one thinks of the yearbook photo spread, we can all learn a lesson from their fortitude.
Mr. O’Connor is of course correct that editors should take account of community values in exercising discretion as to what they publish. Student editors learn this best when they learn it themselves through experience. But whatever Mr. O’Connor’s low opinion of his readers may be, ignorance of the law and blind obedience to authority are not community values.
Frank D. LoMonte
Executive Director
Student Press Law Center
Columnist responds to scathing letter
Editor’s note: This is Michael O’Connor’s response to the SPLC letter.
Mr. LoMonte’s disagreement with my column may charitably be said to center on the interpretation of Hazelwood as applied to the Burleson High School case.
My comments proceeded from the assumption that Hazelwood applies in this case and then explored the implications of editorial control. I was not trying to imply that principals may whack away at student publications willy-nilly. But I also did not spend time onthe details of the decision.
I would encourage readers to read the full decision and the dissent that was written by Justice William Brennan and joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun. You can find a copy at www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/hazelwood.html. In addition, readers should look at SPLC’s analysis of Hazelwood, which is more extensive than LoMonte’s letter and may be found at www.splc.org/pdf/HazelwoodGuide.pdf.
A central issue for the court was that the school’s regulation of published material be governed by a legitimate pedagogical, or teaching, concern.
Two teaching concerns must be looked at here. One is to teach the broad scope of journalistic values, including appropriateness of material. The other is whether the material counters other curricula taught in the school. In this case the principal believed the article countered the school’s abstinence education emphasis.
The Supreme Court’s decision was summarized later by Justice Samuel Alito as allowing “a school to regulate what is in essence the school’s own speech, that is, articles that appear in a publication that is an official school organ.”
Toward that end Hazelwood specifically calls the school the publisher of the material and says, “A school must be able to set high standards for the student speech that is disseminated under its auspices — standards that may be higher than those demanded by some newspaper publishers or theatrical producers in the ‘real’ world — and may refuse to disseminate student speech that does not meet those standards.”
The school’s administration believed the article did not reflect the school’s positions and axed the article. Read Hazelwood and judge for yourself.
Michael O’Connor
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