THE PRINCIPALS OF CENSORSHIP

...As journalism is supposed to be, in school or out, when it's actually free...

...On February 29, it was distributed on campus with but one minor disruption...

...Even within these limitations, however, the student press can raise much more controversy, get involved in much more muckraking, and defy school authorities much more often than most high school papers do...

...After hearing the facts of each case, I told the aggrieved individual to contact the Indiana affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union because in each case I heard, if a lawsuit were brought, the principal's decision would be reversed...

...The principal censored the piece because, he said, it was accusatory, wasn't well written, wasn't "positive," and might bring negative phone calls to the school...

...But Kristof, too, found exceptions...

...The censorship, moreover, was done in the dark...

...One of the three plaintiffs in the St...

...Now I think I know...

...But they told me how a week earlier an assistant principal had confiscated their newspaper before it could be distributed because he didn't like some of the material in it...

...There is not a trace of an obscene or defamatory word, and no chance that any classroom at Hazelwood East High School would have even a piece of chalk disrupted by the publication of this special section...

...Judging from the court papers, let alone the facts in the case, these students are virtually certain to win in Federal district court...

...Those who have used that bright sword most vigorously and fearlessly have been few and far between...

...It found that "censorship and the systematic lack of freedom to engage in open, responsible journalism characterize high school [newspapers...

...The journalists were furious but felt helpless because, the editor told me, "the administration can do anything it wants...

...Unconstitutional and arbitrary restraints [by school officials] are so deeply imbedded in high school journalism as to overshadow its achievement...

...Chuck Reineke took a proper First Amendment view of the burning: "The purpose of my lawsuit was to win freedom of expression at McEachern High School, and that freedom includes even the right of students to burn our newspaper if they want to...

...No agent of the state can march into The New York Times or The National Enquirer and prevent publication of an article the censor considers to be obscene or defamatory...

...It was also, they said, a lot of fun...

...The paper may be prosecuted on those charges after it's on the streets, but only its editors decide what's going to be printed...

...Otherwise, writing in the high school press can be robust, acerbic, irreverent, and quite personally nasty...

...The subject was the high school press and its connection, if any, with the First Amendment...

...The 1969 Tinker decision is the Magna Carta of student First Amendment rights, including student press rights...

...In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the state wishes to communicate...

...Hoffmann asked the principal to stop messing around with the First Amendment rights of his client, and the principal responded by shutting down the paper entirely...

...Every one of them has told me that the experience—the preparation for court, the need to cope with being a figure of controversy at school, and the feeling of being part of a very long tradition of freedom now become very personal—was the most memorable event of their growing-up years...

...How come...

...The principal's most ingenious rationale for banning the article, though, was his contention that it would cause material disruption of the school's learning environment...

...J. Marc Abrams is the director...

...In 1979, when he was sixteen and editor of Arrowhead, the official publication at McEachern High School, Cobb County, Georgia, he saw his paper seized by the authorities, and later shut down completely...

...Among the stories and commentary Reineke had initially printed was an indictment of the principal for violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by broadcasting daily prayers over the school's public address system...

...Why was it censored...

...And none of the kids in the school has divorced parents, is pregnant, has ever thought of running away, or has given a thought to birth control...

...Aclassic illustration of the constitutional ignorance of school administrators all these years after Tinker is a case currently in the Federal courts of Missouri...

...There were exceptions, the Commission said, but in most schools, there was "an unhealthy acquiescence [by students] in pronouncements by school authorities no matter how unfair or oppressive they may be...

...Most of the kids were on the fast track...

...When their abuses are resisted, and the subsequent battle is publicized, the censors usually run out of steam...

...In the years since, some lower courts have used Tinker to beat back school officials who think they should have total control over student expression in school newspapers...

...Finally, the student editor asked an ACLU volunteer attorney, William Hoffmann, for help...

...On a good day, one hand may go up...

...And so it has always been throughout the history of the First Amendment...

...The pieces, they say, were "too sensitive...

...Thereupon, more than 150 students at McEachern High signed a statement, at the principal's request, that those articles sure as hell would have disrupted the school if they'd been printed...

...However, with the exception of only one circuit—the Seventh, which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin—courts around the country have generally held that the student press can be subject to prior restraint, provided that the school administration establishes clear guidelines for its review procedures...

...Moreover, the judge told the principal to release the confiscated issue of Arrowhead, and the principal was prohibited from ever again censoring anything in the paper except material that is libelous, legally obscene, or likely to substantially disrupt the school...

...principals suspending school journalists who had created an alternative, "underground" paper...

...In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their views...

...And almost invariably, those guidelines are limited by the courts to obscenity, defamation, and disruption...

...What dismayed me even more than these grim reports of the similarity between Indiana's student press and, let's say, that of Bulgaria, was each caller's ignorance of his or her First Amendment rights...

...Student Press Law Center, 800 18th Street NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20006...

...In Virginia, on March 5, 1984, Charlottesville High School was closed, The Washington Post reported, "after a school newspaper article containing derogatory comments about blacks sparked student scuffling...

...Students can print just about anything except material that is obscene or defamatory, or that may substantially disrupt the learning process in a school...

...For years, I have been puzzled as to what combination of words could possibly be construed as so substantially disruptive as to be censorable under the guidelines set by the courts...

...The students shy away from conflict and controversy and learn to be subjects rather than citizens...

...He ordered him to reinstate the newspaper, along with Chuck Reineke as its editor...

...Louis case, however, is annoyed, not only at the slow learner who is her principal, but also some of her colleagues on the school paper...

...Federal District Judge G. Ernest Tid-well, basing his decision on the Tinker case, said the only way the principal could win would be to prove that the censored material would have substantially disrupted the school's operations...

...Maybe two more hands are raised...

...It was only when the printer delivered the papers that the staff realized the special section, after months of work, was missing...

...For the whole hour, the only callers were kids, and all of them had stories to tell that would have made John Peter Zenger weep: principals censoring school papers at whim and will...

...he said, just in poor taste...

...In 1974, five years after the Tinker decision, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Commission of Inquiry into High School Journalism issued a report, Captive Voices (Shocken Books...

...I have read all the censored articles, and I can testify that the pieces are carefully researched and so responsible that they're a bit dull...

...his decision had not only been unconstitutional but sufficiently stupid to embarrass the school system...

...Consider, for instance, Chuck Reineke...

...Because the student involved refused to yield silently and instead appealed the principal's decision, other high school and adult newspapers in Madison picked up the story (some also ran the censored editorial) and, as a result, the principal was overruled...

...The articles that were not fit to be printed in Spectrum concerned teen-age runaways, teen-age marriages, the after-effects of divorce on the children involved, and the furor over the since-overturned Reagan Administration rule that requires parents to be notified if their daughters received birth-control devices from Federally funded clinics...

...In 1983, Nicholas Kristof, in his book, Freedom of the High School Press (University Press of America), said, on the basis of his survey of the high school press: "Most high school newspapers purvey only pablum, so that is all the students learn to digest...

...It's their paper...

...The article had characterized black students at the school as more interested in "smoking herb" and "starting fights" than in their studies...

...Anybody here ever hear of the Tinker decision...

...He also ran pieces about the draft and a reminder that a 1979 member of the school board had campaigned for that post in 1960 on a pledge to keep the schools segregated...

...In such authoritarian schools, students' rights are routinely denied, with little or no protest by students...

...They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved...

...Accompanied by fifty to sixty students and with the media in tow, the McEachern student-body president burned several copies in front of the school to show his support for the administration...

...This ignorance among student journalists is alarmingly widespread...

...It's a question I ask in every high school and junior high school I visit, no matter why I'm supposed to be there...

...And they are also unaware of such resources open to them as their local ACLU offices and the Student Press Law Center, which provides legal assistance and information to student journalists and their advisers anywhere in the country...

...The principal had removed the pages without telling anyone at the paper...

...The judge was not impressed by this act of the principal's loyal subjects...

...Her fellow high school journalists had decided not to join in the court action brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri...

...They pay for it...

...Such an article will not appear again...

...There is a rather depressing epilogue to that victory, as described by Michael Simpson, then director of the Student Press Law Center, in the March 29, 1980, issue of The Nation: "The principal finally released the September issue, five months after it was confiscated—but twenty days short of The Progressive's record for prior restraint...

...Well, said the principal, if he had allowed the article to be printed, there would have been rebuttals that might have required censoring, and "in my opinion, [it would be] a disruption of the school to spend my time censoring the newspaper...

...And in the process, they will have taught the principal and other administrators at Hazelwood East a rather useful, and maybe lasting, lesson on the First Amendment rights of high school journalism...

...He hadn't claimed the offending material was obscene or defamatory...

...Three students at Hazelwood East High School in North St...

...The administrators have come up with their usual juggling act of explanations...

...But other lower courts have spelled out limitations on students' First Amendment rights...

...A year ago, in Boulder, Colorado, I met with the staff of the newspaper in that city's most prestigious public high school...

...They've been brought up not to challenge anything, to accept the way things are____I think that's a shame...

...Nonetheless, it seems to me that no newspaper is fundamentally free if it is subject to prior restraint...

...principals who threatened dissident editors and reporters with informing the colleges of their choice that the youngsters were chronic troublemakers...

...It is a shame that more kids don't take the exhilarating risk of learning what it is to be a free person under the Constitution...

...As Reineke and other exceptions discover, censors cannot withstand close scrutiny...

...It was, Nat Hentoff writes every month about music and occasionally about First Amendment issues...

...Says plaintiff Leslie Smart, "They have no backbone whatever...

...So long as we keep having exceptions in each generation, there is hope for the next...

...Anybody ever hear of the case in which three kids were suspended from school because they'd worn black armbands to class to protest the war in Vietnam...

...The fundamental difference between the rights of the adult press and those of student journalists is that the former are free of prior restraint (except once in a very great while, as The Progressive found out with its H-bomb article five years ago...

...That story was censored...

...The cost of such controls is not only the absence of a free student press but also bland, apathetic students who are unaware of or uninterested in their rights...

...Part of the reason for the general lassitude is, in fact, student journalists' ignorance of their rights...

...Okay, I'll make it easier for you...

...For instance, the Seventh Circuit said it is within the free-press rights of a school editor to characterize the comments of a senior dean as "the product of a sick mind...

...In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism...

...And anyway, "a school newspaper is about school news...

...Through the years, I've talked to students who have refused to let a principal get away with sabotaging their First Amendment rights...

...And they sure were bright...

...Louis have brought suit against administrators at their school for censoring a two-page section of their paper, Spectrum...

...Instead of sympathy, I gave them a quiz...

...In a seven-to-two ruling, Abe Fortas, writing for the Supreme Court in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District, declared resoundingly, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate...

...The piece was a calm, lucid, compassionate call for respecting the rights of homosexuals...

...School officials have the burden of proving that something is legally defamatory or libelous before they can order it excised—or that certain words are explosive enough to blow the school apart...

...The school paper kept getting censored and was once confiscated...

...At East High School in Madison, Wisconsin, during the winter of 1984, a student wrote an editorial for the school paper, Tower Times, that he titled, "Homophobia: A Social Disease...