Hazelwood: Some Remaining Questions

By on November 12, 2012 in First Amendment, Internet

As our great keynote speaker, panelists, and audience members discussed the 25-year history of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier last week, it became clear that there still is scholarly work that needs to be done in this important area of law.  Here are a few of the interesting questions raised at the conference:

What are the connections between school culture, student free expression, and civic engagement?

Are public school journalism programs being cut due to overall budget cuts?

What are the academic backgrounds of school media advisers, and do they matter?  Is a media adviser with a background in the humanities more likely to support student free expression than an adviser with a background in math or science? One audience member asked whether social studies teachers, who should care about civic engagement, should work with student journalists. Another person observed that teachers too often don’t work outside their subject-specific silos.

How are charter schools regulating the expressive activities of their students?  One of our panelists observed that charter schools are public schools that want to operate like private schools.  She said there are many examples of censorship by charter schools and of charter schools with no student media at all.  California has enacted a statute to prevent charter schools from denying their students’ constitutional rights.

What has been the impact of the nation’s political polarization on student free expression?

What, if anything, is left of Tinker?

What is online student speech, and what is offline student speech?  (Or, more eloquently, where is the schoolhouse gate?) How do and should courts differentiate between the two?

Keynote speaker Erwin Chemerinsky said the Supreme Court treats schools as authoritarian institutions – like prisons.  To what extent is the Court correct?  What does that mean for student free expression?

If you have other questions to share, please post a comment.  Thanks for the great conference, everyone!

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Hazelwood’s Sheep

By on November 9, 2012 in First Amendment

University of Arizona’s David Cuillier told us yesterday that “we’re raising a generation of sheep” in the wake of Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, the U.S. Supreme Court case that curtailed the First Amendment rights of students. The Media Law & Policy Center has been holding an eye-opening two-day conference on the 25th anniversary of the decision and the state of student speech more generally.

David’s comments hit me hard as a teacher of college students but especially as the mother of a 9-year-old.

Though the U.S. Supreme Court told us in Tinker v. Des Moines that students’ free speech rights don’t stop at the schoolhouse gate, we may want to think about having parents and educators check their helicopter propellers there. I work hard to check mine every morning, but as I look around, I see many of us, including teachers, swooping in at the first sign of struggle with our children and with our students. Our effect on student speech environments is significant, and it is fundamentally changing how we think about free speech and how we think about regulating it.

Our tendency toward the “helicopter response” is showing up in our classrooms, and it makes talking about controversial topics just that much tougher every year I teach.

On Wednesday I decided to reserve time in my journalism media law class for discussion of the presidential election. At first, students were hesitant to talk, as usual, for fear of judgment and disagreement. I did my usual teeth-pulling. Finally, I was told that they were sick of the social media cacophony they were witnessing by those who had “won” and those who were “ready to pray every day to save America.”  Like the four-year-old whose plea for the election to be over went viral, my students were ready to stop talking about the election.

But the truth is they never really started. The truth is that many of them have stayed inside the sheep pen. And we let that happen.

Critical pedagogy theorists like Mina Shaughnessy, Paulo Friere and Henry Giroux have been urging us for years to allow our students to struggle, fail and debate, and then guide their journey toward greater learning. They have been urging us to stop the robotic testing, skilling and drilling, and demands for perfection in academic performance. They urged us to urge them to talk about the difficult stuff – not the stuff I usually wind up talking to them about: test scores and cover letters.

The First Amendment has always recognized the struggle inherent in granting protections for free speech. But in raising our students to be good performers and genuinely nice people, we have taught them that failure and conflict are bad and are to be avoided. We have taught them to be quiet about controversy and about their own failures. And we have hidden our failures as educators along the way.

Not all students are like this, obviously, but in ten years of teaching, I will say that many are. And many more are potentially headed in that direction.

What will it take to change that approach? I’ll take that up in my next post, but welcome your thoughts here.

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Film Screening of Miss Representation

By on November 8, 2012 in Journalism

This coming Monday, November 12, the Center is partnering with the UNC Conference on Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity, Women in Law, Domestic Violence Action Project, Child Action, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, and the Lambda Law Students Association to present a screening of Miss Representation.  The film, written, directed and produced by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.  The showing is part of a week-long documentary film festival, showcasing award-winning films about contemporary legal issues that implicate women’s rights.

Check out our events page for more information on the screening.

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Clearing the Haze Over Hazelwood: Student Speech Rights in the Digital Age

By on November 7, 2012 in First Amendment

Tomorrow, with our friends at the Student Press Law Center, First Amendment Law Review and North Carolina Scholastic Media Association, the center will kick off a two-day conference focused on student speech rights and their role in youth civic engagement.  The event, which is entitled “One Generation Under Hazelwood: A 25-Year Retrospective,” will examine the impact of Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the Supreme Court’s only ruling addressing the rights of high school journalists.

The team that organized the conference (Tabitha Messick, Whitney Nebolisa, Monica Hill, and Frank LoMonte) have done an amazing job bringing together the leading scholars and thinkers on the subject of student speech rights, including Erwin Chemerinsky, who will be the keynote speaker. You can see the schedule for the two days here.  But don’t fret if you can’t make it in person, UNC’s IT folks will be live streaming the sessions and the Twitter hashtag is #Hazelwood25, if you want to follow along.

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A Marriage Made in Tatooine

By on November 3, 2012 in Copyright

On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain.

–YODA, Dark Rendezvous

Although Hurricane Sandy and the election dominated my social media feeds this week, it was the announcement that LucasFilm FTD had been sold to Disney for $4 billion that seemed to cement the feeling of gloom to the week’s somber headlines.

For Star Wars groupies especially, the news was met with scorn, dismay and a distinctive C-3P0 anxiety attack. While there was some enthusiasm for the announcement, among many aging geeks, there was a sense that George Lucas had sold out his fans and that the whole franchise had run its course.

For those of us who’ve watched the last decade of big media copyright wars, however, the sale presented a certain Jedi-logic.

First, the sale represents an intellectual property marriage between two media giants who have a long track record of suing their fans for infringement – and who never particularly embraced the need for even a modest public relations effort in the wake of filing such claims. (Though Lucas, in recent years, engaged in what Larry Lessig referred to as a form of fandom “sharecropping.”)

The hubris index is not a factor in filing IP claims, but it should be. Neither company has been terribly expert at embracing their fans and understanding the extent to which their entertainment became a shared culture, something people love so deeply they spend their free time building, remixing and dreaming up the next iteration of that culture.

Secondly – and somewhat amusingly — the sale has spurred yet more culture jamming – with dozens of memes passing our screens this week. Most were not exactly the images on which to build the next generation of Star Wars devotees. This, of course, was all protected speech – and 10-year-olds will be oblivious to it — but exactly what kind of a business does a Disney/Star Wars hope to build in the wake of such a reaction?

I think with enough exploitation, derivative works are capable of reaching an endpoint — a Tatooine desert, if you’ll allow the metaphor.

Maybe that’s not the case for the mega-empire that is Star Wars – particularly if they’ve decided the 30+ crowd is no longer their target — but the cynicism this week online has me wondering.

Clearly, Disney is counting on the background noise this week to fade. But its base is the aging geek. And I think we know the difference between a moon and a space station.

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