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Professional Standards And The First Amendment In Higher Education: When Institutional Academic Freedom Collides With Student Speech Rights, Clay Calvert

Saint Louis University Law Journal

This article analyzes the disturbingly growing use of external professional standards by public colleges and universities to squelch students’ First Amendment speech rights. Using the 2016 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Keefe v. Adams and the 2015 decision by the Ninth Circuit in Oyama v. University of Hawaii as analytical springboards, the article exposes the tension between two competing First Amendment rights – the institutional academic freedom of public universities to control curricula and the free speech rights of public university students both on and off campus. Without guidance from the Supreme Court, …