Student Press

U.S. Supreme Court's Ruling in a Higher Education Case

Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri (1973) was the U.S. Supreme Court's first, and only, case involving a newspaper on a college or university campus. In Papish, officials at a state university expelled a graduate student for distributing an off-campus newspaper that violated the institution's policy against “indecent speech.” Specifically, the newspaper contained a cartoon depicting the Statue of Liberty being raped by a policeman and a newspaper article containing offensive language. A federal trial court and the Eighth Circuit upheld the student's expulsion, but the Supreme Court reversed in her behalf. The Court ruled that the mere dissemination of ideas on a state university campus could not be shut off in the name of conventions of decency alone, regardless of how offensive those ideas may have been.

Circuit Court Decisions in Higher Education

Less than a month after Papish, the Fourth Circuit, in Joyner v. Whiting (1973), decided that officials at a public, predominantly Black university in North Carolina had no obligation to establish student newspapers. However, the court added that if officials did allow student newspapers, the officials could not terminate the newspapers' publication on the basis of dissatisfaction with their editorial content. Joyner involved an editorial in which Black students criticized the admission of White students in the light of the growing population of White students on campus. Even though the president of the university disagreed with this perspective, the court directed him to restore funding to the student newspaper. The court interpreted the president's actions as abridging the students' freedom of the press in violation of the First Amendment. Likewise, in Schiff v. Williams (1975), the Fifth Circuit declared that a public university could not control the content of a student newspaper except under “special circumstances.” The court thus affirmed that university officials could not remove students from their positions as editors of the campus newspaper due to disagreements over the way in which the students managed the newspaper.

In Stanley v. McGrath (1983), the Eighth Circuit reviewed the actions of officials at a public university in Minnesota who changed the funding mechanism for the student newspaper after its staff published a satire issue that contained crude sexual language and offensive remarks about religious and ethnic groups. Although the level of funding was not reduced, officials instituted a policy that allowed students who disapproved of the newspaper to receive a refund for that portion of their services fee that otherwise would have contributed to funding the newspaper. While reiterating that officials were not required to support a student newspaper, the court pointed out that the actions of university officials violated the First Amendment, because their actions were motivated by dissatisfaction with the paper's content, an impermissible violation of the newspaper staff's freedom of expression.

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