DISREPUTABLE POLICIES

School Authority, Yes; Authoritarianism, No

It was a cold January day in 2002 when the Olympic torch was to pass
through Juneau, Alaska. Students at a local high school were released
from class so they could watch the ceremony.

They were not required to attend.

Some got bored and left. Some had snowball fights.

One, Joe Frederick, an 18-year-old senior who hadn't made it to school
that morning, arrived late. Standing across the street from the
school, Frederick unfurled a banner that said, "Bong hits 4 Jesus,"
and hoped to catch the attention of a television crew. He thought the
sign was funny and played right into an ongoing debate in Alaska about
marijuana and drug legalization. The school principal didn't think it
was funny but a contradiction of the school's anti-drug policy. She
crossed the street, tore up Frederick's banner and suspended him for
10 days. He sued her on free speech grounds

The case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday. The
school district isn't even claiming that Frederick's banner was
"disruptive." Only that it went against school policy and, as such,
the principal had every right to tear it up. But Frederick wasn't in a
school assembly.

He wasn't on school grounds.

He wasn't in a school-sponsored event.

The "Winter Olympics Torch Relay" was sponsored by a soft-drink
manufacturer and other Juneau private businesses, and it ran through a
public street.

The school was involved only to the extent that it released students
so they could attend. The principal says it was "an approved social
event or class trip," yet there were no efforts to keep students from
leaving when they got bored.

Even if Frederick was promoting the use or legalization of drugs, he
was not doing so at a school event promoting the opposite, or during a
class on Shakespeare. He was doing so on a public street in the
context of a free-wheeling and apparently dull event, to grab
attention, and with a relatively innocuous message.

Between zero-tolerance rules and minimal tolerance for any behavior
that doesn't toe the line, schools have already reduced their campuses
to such regimented environments that the only expression allowed seems
to be whatever the school endorses or whatever messages advertisers
choose to put up. Student speech is a distant afterthought.

If the Supreme Court extends such school authority beyond schoolhouse
walls to wherever students gather in any capacity even tenuously
involving schools, then a lot more than free expression is being lost.
Students' autonomy -- their personal freedom, their right to be and do
what their school might disapprove of -- will be lost, too. In
exchange for what? Controlling the words and behavior of young people
to that extent -- words and behavior that disrupt nothing but merely
question -- doesn't promote educational values but fear and obedience.
That's good in an authoritarian society molding submissive citizens.
It's repugnant in a society that claims to be molding free and
independent citizens.