The First Amendment and Student Speech

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Richard Campbell
Occasionally, they do these uh.. I've seen these uh.. th- these research trials in which they'll go to a shopping mall and read the First Amendment to people as if Congre — as if it doesn't exist and Congress is getting ready to pass this law: "What do you think of this law? Should we have this law?" And almost all the time they do this, more than 50 percent of the people say, "No, we shouldn't have that. That's way too much. That's going way over the top." I mean, these are people that- that are American citizens that don't know our — what the First

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Amendment is and what it actually protects.

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Richard Campbell
The First Amendment is uh.. something that I spend a lotta time on and teaching the — our basic journalism classes. It's something that I'm involved in because I have students that work for- for our student newspaper at Miami University. Uhm.. students often face uh.. pressure from administration when they do stories that are negative. I see this a lot. They uh.. the students sometimes get criticized because parents are coming in for a weekend and they're doing negative stories that're gonna reflect badly on the university or the school.

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Frank LoMonte
Really, it- it's counterintuitive to many educators and it's something that we have to work very hard at working with principals and superintendents, especially to understand, which is to say, the more involvement by administrators in a student paper, the greater the liability exposure for the school, not the converse. Many of them have been poorly advised by their own attorneys to read everything in the paper, because they feel that somehow that is insulating them from liability. In fact, the surest way to get successfully sued as a

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school is to set yourself up as super publisher of the content and take responsibility for everything that is in it. It is so much better, both from a liability perspective, and frankly, from a community relations perspective, for the principal to be able to say, "That's the students' speech. It's out of my hands." It just makes more sense from a legal and from a management and from a public relations standpoint to let the students control the editorial content, to say nothing of the fact that it's a much better

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educational experience. Students learn so much more when they have to take responsibility for editorial decisions, and surprisingly, when they're well advised and they're well educated about the law, they make good judgments. They use restraint. They don't print everything that they could.