Religious Activities on Campus

Student expressive rights in higher education reflect the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Community School District (1969). In Tinker, the justices declared, in response to public school students wearing black arm bands to express their opposition to the Vietnam war, that “neither students [nor] teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate” (p. 506). Unlike free expression litigation in K-12 settings that have often involved individual or classroom expressive activities, issues in higher education deal primarily with the expressive activities of student groups outside of classroom settings or with student organizations. Virtually all of the higher education law in the area of campus expressive rights has been distilled from litigation involving the interpretation ...