In one of the first cases concerning off-campus speech of college students, the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that the University of Minnesota was justified in disciplining a former student in the mortuary program for her Facebooks posts in 2009. The university claimed the student violated the student code of conduct and gave her a failing grade in her anatomy-laboratory class and put her on academic probation for the rest of her undergraduate years.
In a move that troubled many First Amendment advocates, the appeals court ruled that the student had created substantial disruption in making distasteful comments about the treatment of cadavers. “In its analysis of the free speech issues at hand, the court’s opinion centered on the 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. In Tinker — which focused on the rights of students to wear black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War — the Court held that public junior high and high school students have a right to speak freely, with the exception of speech that is illegal or causes a substantial disruption to school activities,” wrote Seth Zweifler for the Student Press Law Center. Some felt it was out of kilter to invoke Tinker that concerned the actions of junior high school students in a case about the conduct of a college student. -db
From the Student Press Law Center, July 13, 2011, by Seth Zweifler.