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“Does she ever get to be not a cheerleader, or is she always a cheerleader in her life?”ĭiei, who studies on the university’s Memphis campus, says that administrators appear to be making up the rules as they go and imposing their personal tastes to make broad judgments about student behavior. “Do they lose their ability to be anything other than a student at any point in their daily lives?” said Vera Eidelman, a lawyer with the speech, privacy and technology project of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Pennsylvania affiliate is representing the cheerleader.

The Supreme Court found in 1973 that the university had violated the First Amendment by expelling the student and held that “the mere dissemination of ideas - no matter how offensive to good taste - on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’ 'Ĭivil libertarians say students should be allowed to hang up their backpacks and stop worrying about how they reflect on their school when they leave campus. In another case that raises similar questions of decorum as Diei’s, the University of Missouri expelled a student for reprinting an offensive cartoon and a vulgar headline in an underground newspaper, saying it violated a university policy requiring students “to observe generally accepted standards of conduct” and prohibiting “indecent conduct or speech.” The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that the armbands were protected speech. In one such case, Des Moines, Iowa, schools tried to stop students from wearing black armbands to protest the Vietnam War, forcing them to conform to a certain societal standard of conduct.

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But the Mahanoy Area School District is appealing, in a case being closely watched by school authorities who are hungry for clear answers as to how far they can go in punishing off-campus social media speech.Ĭivil liberties lawyers say that such cases represent a revival of battles over free expression that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during similarly polarized times. The cheerleader had sent an image to 250 Snapchat friends of herself and a friend raising their middle fingers, along with text cursing “school,” “softball,” “cheer” and “everything.” Several students complained to the school about the message.Īfter getting kicked off the team, she sued and won reinstatement. In a sign of how sticky the issue has become, the Supreme Court agreed in January to hear the case of a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania who was removed from the junior varsity squad after she posted vulgar complaints about not making the varsity team. “But it happens fairly frequently that things are brought to the attention of the administration.” “Universities don’t tend to be social media police in the sense that they’re out there actively monitoring social media,” Merritt said. Universities generally do not hunt through the social media of their students unless a member of their community, like a student or graduate, complains of threatening, inappropriate or harassing language in a post, or unless it puts the university in an “inappropriate light,” said Mark Merritt, a former general counsel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“When they are shouting on Twitter, is it their space or yours?”

“If someone is shouting in a classroom, you have the right to control the time, place and manner,” he said.