College student loses classroom speech case

Its' been a while since the Second Circuit has issued a precedential student speech case. In this case, the Court of Appeals holds that a college student cannot sue his teacher who censored his speech on a school assignment.

The case is Collins v. Putt, issued on October 9. Collins took a Communications 101 virtual class in which the students had to comment on a video that depicted a young man conversing with and assisting an elderly disabled person. In evaluating the video, Collins responded with a blog post that critiqued the assignment and said the video was "excruciating awkward," "ridiculous," and depicted "two complete idiots having a conversation that could only take place in an alternative reality on a planet far, far away." He also said the older character in the video was "cranky," "self-pitying," "angry," and engaged in "miserable griping." The teacher removed the blog post and said that some might find it offensive.

Student speech cases are evaluated under different legal standards, depending on the context. In Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Sch. Dist. (1969), the Supreme Court said school administrators cannot restrict speech unless it materially disrupts the educationally environment. Since that case involved students silently wearing anti-war armbands, the kids won the case. But in Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier (1988), the Court said that school-sponsored speech may be regulated if the restriction is reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. This is a much more difficult burden for plaintiffs to satisfy, and the Hazelwood plaintiffs lost because it involved censorship of the high school newspaper.

The Second Circuit (Lohier and Raggi) says this is a Hazelwood case because Collins' speech arose in a school-sponsored forum, a blog devoted to classroom assignments. It was not merely personal expression that arose in the school environment, taking the Tinker standard out of the case.

In partial dissent, Judge Menashi says this speech restriction violated the First Amendment because it constituted viewpoint discrimination. Under the pro-school district Hazelwood standard, while administrators can restrict the content of speech, they cannot restrict viewpoint expression. There is a difference between content and viewpoint restrictions. Judge Menashi says the professor restricted Collins' viewpoint because the class assignment examined student perceptions, and the teacher deleted the blog post because people might find it offensive, which makes it a viewpoint restriction. The Menashi opinion is probably the longest discussion on viewpoint discrimination I've seen in the Second Circuit. But he also holds that the teacher would still be entitled to qualified immunity since the law was not clearly established at the time that speech restrictions involving an in-class audience cannot be censored. "A professor might have reasonably believed that online posts were a continuation of classroom lectures and discussion that the professor could regulate more than student expression in a more traditional forum in which speech is directed to an outside audience." So even under Judge Menashi's concurrence, Collins would have lost on this basis.