censorship laws become an important issue in schools and universities

According to free speech experts, censorship has spread in schools and colleges throughout the United States in recent years.

In 2011, the Minnesota State Supreme Court ruled in favor of the University of Minnesota to reprimand the off-campus speech of student Amanda Tatro for comments made on Facebook.

The court indicated this ruling was not due to the nature of the comments but their effect on the university's curriculum. Therefore, it became possible for the university to control a student's off-campus speech when it affected the reputation of the school.

"To the extent a decision is made regarding curriculum, the school should be able to make it," Missouri Press Association consultant Jean Maneke said. "To the extent a publication exists as public forum, there needs to be tolerance for free speech."

Tatro's Facebook comments focused on taking out her aggression in a science-mortuary class on a cadaver she named Bernie. Another student found the posts offensive and turned them over to the university. Families that donated cadavers called in concerns to the university, and Tatro was briefly expelled from class while police investigated her Facebook threats to stab an ex-boyfriend with medical equipment.

Tatro was venting in an off-campus forum thought to be outside the university's reach. Due to a lack of precedent for this case, the courts looked to the 1988 Missouri case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier involving high school students.

Before Hazelwood, the Supreme Court gave primary education students the benefit of free speech as long as it was not disruptive to the school environment. Hazelwood increased the level of censorship to control any action that caused "legitimate concern related to individual rights, safety or distractions to the school environment."

The Hazelwood decision allowed school officials to censor clothing, speech and even hair color. The 6th Circuit Court also recently applied the Hazelwood decision to permit a university to discipline off-campus speech it said affected school relations in the 2011 Minnesota v. Tatro case.

"The First Amendment document called this the chilling effect," said Charles Davis, University of Missouri's facilitator of the Media of the Future Initiative for Mizzou Advantage. "It makes people think twice about what they are saying."

A representative of the Student Press Law Center agreed that university students should not be judged on the same standard as high school students.

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censorship laws become an important issue in schools and universities