Cyberbullying isn’t just wrong in Vernon County, Wisconsin. After this week, electronic messages that annoy, offend or ridicule are now criminal. Yesterday, the county voted to approve the anti-cyberbullying ordinance that was approved by the county board of supervisors last month.

The penalty is fairly stiff. If anyone is found guilty of violating the ordinance, they could be fined up to $500 and sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in jail. With this move, Vernon is following the lead of other municipalities around the state that have put a similar rule on the books over the last several years.

According to the Student Press Law Center, the text of the new ordinance doesn’t specifically mention students, but according to the Vernon County Sheriff John Spears, they will be the law’s primary targets. He said making cyberbullying illegal in the county will go a long way to helping curb the practice. He added that it would also provide an effective tool in dealing with bullies.

However, not everyone was as optimistic that the rule would make a difference.

Justin Patchin, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center, said that he was contacted by the county before the ordinance was passed to give input on it. Patchin said he’s skeptical of the effectiveness of Vernon County’s law as well as those passed elsewhere.

Patchin said that there do not seem to be any incidents where anyone was charged under the anti-bullying measure, which makes judging their effectiveness a difficult task. He thought, however, that Vernon’s measure and similar ones elsewhere weren’t likely to have much of an impact.

Wisconsin already has an anti-bullying measure on the books, though it doesn’t specifically single out harassment that happens over text messages and social media.

Two other state laws have been used in cases of cyberbullying, Patchin said. A 2010 school safety law requires school districts to draft their own policy involving bullying of any type, and the state’s Unlawful Use of Computerized Communication Systems law can be used in criminal cases of bullying through electronic devices. That law criminalizes only“a pattern of conduct composed of a series of acts over a period of time.”

Patchin explained that laws prohibiting cyberbullying were passed in 16 states, so to fill the gap, a number of smaller municipalities drafted measures prohibiting it on their own. Patchin himself believes that criminalizing this kind of conduct is going too far, and the best approach to stop this kind of harassment is to address it informally and on an individual basis.

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Presidential elections, especially closely-fought ones, sometimes bring out the worst in the country’s citizens. That seemed to have been the case this November, when, after the reelection of President Barack Obama, more than a few young people took to Twitter to air their frustration with the choices made by the voters.

In response, Gawker media website Jezebel collected the most racially insensitive tweets of the bunch, directed mainly at President Obama, and published them – including the real names of their authors, who were mainly high school students – for their readers to see and judge. According to Ken Paulson, writing for USA Today, the collection proved a sorry one full of racist epithets, stereotypes and “with N-word in abundance.”

In some cases, Jezebel bloggers even contacted the students’ schools to seek comment from administrators about the tweets.

Although the the list no doubt garnered Jezebel many pageviews, what it didn’t garner them was many friends. Technology news website GigaOM even asked if what Jezebel was doing crossed the line into cyberbullying. When does this kind of denunciation of sentiments expressed by fairly young adults go too far?

The answer to that is never. It would be a mistake to mischaracterize the denunciation of racially offensive speech as abusive. To the contrary, that give-and-take (or more precisely “say something deeply offensive and get verbally pummeled”) is what free speech in America is all about. That’s the flaw in virtually every strategy to keep students in both high school and college on the social media straight and narrow. High school is all about preparing the next generation for citizenship. We teach them civics, history, a smattering of math and science and hand them a diploma. But we too often also try to control their every move. That’s literally the case with the news last week that a sophomore at John Jay High School in San Antonio was expelledafter refusing to carry an ID with a computer chip designed to track the movements of every student in the school.

Although Paulson mischaracterizes the story in question – the student refused to wear both RFID-fitted ID card and the one that with the tracking technology removed, offered as a compromise – he insists that schools have been treading a little too heavily on the free expression rights of their students all while attempting to shield them. The Supreme Court has previously found that even when in a school building, neither students nor teachers can be lawfully deprived of their First Amendment rights.

Some feel that by going overboard protecting students from the consequence of their speech, schools are robbing them of the opportunity to learn how to take advantage of these rights responsibly. Learning about both the freedom and the responsibility that comes from exercising your free speech is one of the main steps to becoming a full participant in U.S. democracy – something that schools shouldn’t be taking steps to actively discourage.

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Last year’s “Free to Tweet” campaign could be judged a success by any measure — over 17,000 tweets, including some from celebrities and even the White House, celebrated and commemorated the freedoms offered by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This time around, organizers are hoping to draw even more participants as they announce this year’s “Free to Tweet” contest which kicks off on the first day of December and lasts the entire 15 days of the online First Amendment festival.

The contest will be open to students in high school and beyond – and those 14 years of age and older – who can tweet their thoughts on the First Amendment protections offered in the United States. Appending the hash tag #FreeToTweet will enter their submissions into the “Free to Tweet” scholarship contest and make them eligible to win $5,000 in academic scholarships.

The competition will run between the midnight of December 1st and 11:59pm of December 15th.

The initiative is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and organized by 1 for All, an educational and public service campaign that builds understanding of the First Amendment and its five distinct freedoms: speech, press, religion, assembly and petition. Founding partners in the 1 for All campaign include the First Amendment Center, Newseum, American Society of News Editors and the McCormick Foundation.

The contest and the surrounding celebrations will all be leading up to December 15th’s Bill of Rights Day, first proclaimed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in November of 1941. Roosevelt called a national holiday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, but the historic anniversary was put on hold when just days after the proclamation America entered World War II after Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japanese planes.

Students can enter the scholarship competition by tweeting a message of support – using the hashtag #FreeToTweet – for the First Amendment. A panel of educators and First Amendment experts will review the entries and award five $5,000 scholarships. Judging criteria and complete rules can be found at FreeToTweet.org. Updates on the event can be followed on Twitter at @FreeToTweet2012.

The organizers hope that that they can beat last year’s record of 17,000 tweets in only one day. Among those expressing support for the First Amendment by tweeting about it in 2011 were Blake Shelton, Brad Paisley, Wynonna Judd and many others.

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Americans are forever on the lookout for institutions that can threaten their most cherished right — that of free speech. But even the most paranoid among us would not think that the place where the freedom of speech is suppressed the most is actually somewhere that should be heavily invested in protecting it: college campuses. According to Sohrab Ahmari writing for The Wall Street Journal, the modern university is “the most authoritarian institution” in the country today.

Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is unlikely to disagree with this assessment. For more than a decade, FIRE has been fighting attempts by university administrations to restrict the first amendment rights of their students and faculty.

In an interview with Ahmari, Lukianoff specifically drew attention to a recent incident at Fordham University. After the school’s College Republicans invited popular conservative firebrand Ann Coulter to speak, Fordham’s president Joseph McShane took the unprecedented step of publicly condemning the invitation and the people responsible for it in a letter addressed to the entire student body.

To be clear, Mr. McShane didn’t block Ms. Coulter’s speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a “test” for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken “responsibility for their decisions” and expressing “their regrets sincerely and eloquently.” Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level: “This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I’ve ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech.”

In an interview with Ahmari, Lukianoff describes himself as a lifelong Democrat and a passionate believer in both abortion rights and gay marriage. Yet, he frequently finds himself defending Conservatives and libertarians because the liberal atmosphere on most college campuses makes these groups more at risk for having their First Amendment rights restricted.

To be clear, Mr. McShane didn’t block Ms. Coulter’s speech, but he said that her presence would serve as a “test” for Fordham. A day later, the students disinvited Ms. Coulter. Mr. McShane then praised them for having taken “responsibility for their decisions” and expressing “their regrets sincerely and eloquently.”

Mr. Lukianoff says that the Fordham-Coulter affair took campus censorship to a new level: “This was the longest, strongest condemnation of a speaker that I’ve ever seen in which a university president also tried to claim that he was defending freedom of speech.”

And it’s hard to hold out much hope for things changing in the near future. On the contrary, according to Lukianoff, university administrators almost never formally walk back the statements they’ve made even in the cases where FIRE prevails in court. Meanwhile, in a poll taken in 2010, less than 40% of college students believed that it was safe to hold an opinion considered unpopular on their campus.

The numbers were even more dire when the same question was posed to staff and faculty. Fewer than 20% thought that they would suffer no consequences if their unpopular views became public.

The post Why Do Universities Design Policies to Restrict Free Speech? appeared first on Education News.

Schools are walking a fine line between not restricting their students’ First Amendment rights and attempting to curb what some perceive as abusive cyberbullying of faculty members. The Wall Street Journal reports that North Carolina has taken the next step beyond occasional, piecemeal discipline by making internet postings that are deemed to “intimidate or torment” teachers a crime. Those found guilty of breaking the new law could face fines as high as $1,000 per incident.

There’s a long legal tradition of giving schools wide latitude in regulating student behavior while they are on school grounds, but how monitoring speech that takes place off campus — and especially over the internet — conflicts with the kids’ freedom of speech and expression hasn’t been thoroughly tested. North Carolina lawmakers might feel like they have no choice but to cast the net beyond the building walls, since the teachers have begun to feel the impact of harassment that takes place entirely on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Postings aren’t the only thing curtailed, however. The law also makes it a crime to impersonate someone with an intent to harass or torment.

Critics, however, argue the law risks trampling on mere venting and other less inflammatory forms of expression.

“Our concern is that we don’t throw the First Amendment out the window in our haste to get the kid who is calling the principal bad names on Facebook,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., a national group that advocates for students’ free-speech rights.

It is unclear how the exception to free speech protection for students set out by Supreme Court’s 1969 Tinker v. Des Moines decision — which allowed administrators to restrict speech as long as it was creating a disruption to the learning environment — might extend to the internet. Two recent decisions by the Third U.S. Court of Appeals found that punishing two separate students for creating fake social media profiles of their principals was unconstitutional since both students created the content offline and were clearly parodies.

Yet in a separate case in Connecticut last year, the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found administrators were within the law when they disciplined Avery Doninger, a high-school student, for posting a message to her blog encouraging people to call school officials a profanity in order to protest the school’s “jamfest” being canceled.

The court justified the punishment by saying that it created a substantial disturbance to the learning environment — the exception set out by Tinker v. Des Moines. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, who will most likely prove to be the final arbiter on this issue, has not yet granted a writ of certiorari for any of the above three cases, nor the fourth one dealing with students-to-student internet harassment.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is using this month’s edition of Speech Code of the Month to examine the policies dealing with free expression at the Illinois State University. The university’s Code of Student Conduct contains a clause that outlines what the school calls its “non-negotiable values.” It goes on to state that if the student’s behavior conflicts with any of the values outlined in the section, they must either alter their behavior or leave the school.

According to FIRE’s Samantha Harris, this particular clause could be interpreted as saying that if the student’s particular mode of expression interferes with what the school considers appropriate, it’s possible that this would be sufficient for the student to be asked to leave. In light of the fact that Illinois State is a public institution, is it even permitted to discriminate against modes on expression in this way? Not according to Harris:

As a public university, Illinois State has no right to require its students to adhere to certain values as a condition of membership in the university community. If this is not immediately clear to you, just try substituting the word “patriotism” for any of the values on that list and imagine the university enforcing the policy.

The fact that a state entity cannot force its own values onto others was something that was decided by a Supreme Court case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, in which the court held that compelling a student of a public school to recite the pledge of allegiance violated their constitutional rights.

Although nothing about the values outlined in the Code of Conduct seems threatening, appropriate steps taken to ensure that goals like “diversity” and “social responsibility” are met are a matter of opinion, not objective fact.

One can imagine, for example, a great deal of political speech (on issues such as immigration, affirmative action, and so forth) that might not be viewed as “appreciative of diversity,” but a public university like Illinois State cannot force students expressing such opinions to leave the university because they conflict with the university’s “non-negotiable values.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with having institutional values, and even encouraging students to adhere to those values, says Harris. But to force students under the penalty of expulsion to hold to those values when their actions don’t violate any other laws is a severe attack on their civil rights. According to Harris, leaving the policy as-is or attempting to enforce it could be put the school in a collision course with a lawsuit.

The post FIRE Spotlights Illinois State’s Speech and Conduct Policy appeared first on Education News.

The advent of social media and its growing popularity on college campuses means that students now have a much bigger platform to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech. However, as the number of ways the students are communicating with each other and the world has expanded, so has danger that this speech could be censored. That is why Will Creely, writing for pbs.org’s MediaShift blog, believes that it is more important than ever that a public information campaign be undertaken to make sure people understand that kind of protections are offered by the Constitution’s free speech provisions.

Most things shared on websites like Facebook and Twitter — not just by students, but by all users — are extremely banal. But some, like criticism of professors or government officials, or opinions on the country’s politics, are not. To preempt any attempts to muzzle such speech, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recently updated their free Guide to Free Speech on Campus to keep both students and college administrators appraised on what does and does not constitute protected speech.

In our experience, the best way to combat campus censorship is to educate college students about their right to express themselves. With that in mind, our new Guide offers readers a thorough but accessible treatment of the contours of the right to free expression. We cover the different speech rights afforded K-12 and college students; exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats, obscenity, and incitement; the history of the First Amendment through the years; the difference between speech rights at public and private campuses; common types of restrictions on student speech; and more than 20 scenarios based on actual FIRE cases.

People might think that FIRE’s concerns about restricting student speech are overblown, but Creely counters with examples of the kind of systematic censorship FIRE sees perpetrated time and again on campuses. Just last year a student from Valdosa State University was expelled for protesting the proposed construction of a new parking garage. Hayden Barnes thought the $30 million dollars allocated to the project could be better spent on more environmentally responsible efforts like expanded access to public transportation.

For his efforts, which included a letter to the editor of the student paper, posting flyers around campus, and contacting administrators, Hayden earned the ire of the university’s president, who called Hayden in for a meeting and explained that Hayden had “embarrassed” him and that the parking facility was to be his “legacy.”

After a Barnes’ Facebook post criticizing the university president came to light, the president ordered Barnes dismissed from Valdosa. Subsequently, in a lawsuit, the president was found to be personally liable for infringing on Barnes’ right to due process.

Creely writes that FIRE’s archives are packed with similar examples of students’ criticisms of university policy becoming grounds for disciplinary action or outright dismissal or expulsion.

Further examples are numerous, and equally shocking: the student suspended for criticizing his college’s cozy relationship with a financial services provider on the school’s Facebook page; the student charged with ”disorderly conduct” for mocking his campus’ lack of scooter parking in an email to administrators; the students ordered to take down a “free speech wall” open to passersby by campus police because it contained profanity. Our case archives are depressingly crowded with more examples.

The post Censorship of Free Speech on College Campuses Grows appeared first on Education News.

Wendy Kaminer, writing in the Atlantic, talks about the increasingly common issue of schools disciplining students for things they say off campus. Schools, universities and workplaces have been struggling to catch up and adjust to social media, and in some cases their reaction to students and employees personal pages has been draconian. At some point it was bound to come to a head and be challenged in court, and now a lawsuit has been filed against Griffith Public Schools on behalf of three girls expelled for a brief Facebook conversation that took place outside school hours, off campus and didn’t involve the use of school owned computers.

the conversation spanned numerous subjects, from the pain of cutting oneself while shaving to the girl’s friendship, before turning to a discussion of which classmates they’d like to kill if they had the chance. At all times, the conversation was purely in jest … as is evidenced by the girl’s repeated use of ‘emoticons’ … abbreviations (like lol) and consistent capitalization intended to represent sarcasm.

The school principal and the ‘expulsion examiner’ both agreed that the three girls should be expelled, despite the protests of one of the ‘victims’ who said he understood the girls had just been joking and had no wish to see them punished.

Ms Kaminer, herself a lawyer, argues that the students have a strong First Amendment case. Despite the fact that student speech rights can be seen to have been eroded since being upheld in a 1968 Supreme Court decision she notes that there is relatively recent case law that accepts that there is no ‘categorical harassment exception’ to the First Amendment and the Griffith rulebook is full of overly vague terms. Also, while schools are required to protect students from harassment this is not a mandate to ignore the First Amendment.

The former Griffith students expelled for their Facebook chatter had not, therefore, been stripped of all speech rights by virtue of their status as students, and those rights should easily prevail over any professed concerns about harassment. Their speech didn’t qualify as harassment, even under the broadened, potentially censorious standards issued by the Obama Administration. It was not “severe, pervasive, or persistent” and apparently presented no bar to any student’s access or opportunities.

The post How Much Should Schools Police Off-Campus Facebook Speech? appeared first on Education News.

However, lawyers on both sides were disappointed. Instead of any resolute decision being made, next year the high court will again be asked to wade into the issue, writes the Associated Press.

Francisco Negron, general counsel of the National School Boards Association, said:

“We’ve missed an opportunity to really clarify for school districts what their responsibility and authority is.

“This is one of those cases where the law is simply lagging behind the times.”

Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, believes that the Supreme Court should examine the question “sooner rather than later.”

“When kids go to school, the parents give up control. But once the kids leave the school, the parents again are the primary custodians, and have decision-making authority over those kids.”

The 1969 Supreme Court precedent holds that student expression may not be suppressed unless school officials reasonably conclude that it would “materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school,” writes David Kravets at Wired.

One of the cases discussed began in 2005, whereby a student created a parody that said his principal smoked marijuana and kept beer behind his desk. The student was suspended by the school, but the suspension was overturned by a district judge and upheld by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

In another Pennsylvania case, an eighth-grader in the Blue Mountain School District used her principal’s photograph to create a fake profile on MySpace, describing him as a pedophile and mentioning a sex act. The girl was suspended for 10 days but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says that she can pursue damages and legal costs. 3rd Circuit majority wrote:

“Though disturbing, the record indicates that the profile was so outrageous that no one took its content seriously.”

In both cases, the circuit based their decision on the 1969 Supreme Court precedent.

Disparities like this are common across the nation, as school districts try out various ways of dealing with how the modern day problems of addressing online pranks, threats or cyberbullying.

Kevin McCoy, president of the West Virginia Family Foundation, believes that the high court’s ruling is a setback but not a blockade to those who oppose the policy.

“Does this make it a little more difficult for us? A little,” McCoy said.

“But it definitely does not close the door to any future challenge.”

The post Supreme Court Refuses to Censor Students’ Online Attacks appeared first on Education News.

Miller’s students recommended that he watch Firefly, a Joss Whedon sci-fi ‘space western’ that lasted just one season on Fox. Despite its limited television play, the series has cultivated a loyal fan-base and a host of spinoffs.

Miller expressed his fan-status by placing a poster on his office door with the following quote from the show:

“You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”

That’s when the University of Wisconsin-Stout’s Chief of Police got involved.

UWS Chief of Police Lisa A. Walter determined that the poster ‘refer[red] to killing’ and could be ‘interpreted as a threat.’ She also advised Miller that he could face criminal charges if he left the poster up:

“If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.”

Miller, in defense of his First Amendment rights, doubled down, placing a poster that said “WARNING: FASCISM” and depicted a face-masked person beating another on the ground with a baton.

Walter responded and explained that his speech was being censored because the new poster ‘depicts violence and mentions violence and death,’ citing the University’s ‘thread assessment team’ as having agreed.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) launched a national campaign to not only support Miller, but also to make clear that speech such as Miller’s shouldn’t be censored — especially on the campus of a public university.

FIRE requested that UWS Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen end the censorship of Miller’s speech and apologize to him for threatening criminal charges:

“It is both shameful and absurd for UWS to suggest that campus community members are so impressionable and unreasonable that merely seeing a reference to violence on a poster will lead them to commit either actual violence or a substantial disruption of the campus,” FIRE Vice President of Programs Adam Kissel said. “The police and the threat assessment team are the true threats to freedom at UW–Stout.”

Adam Baldwin, who co-starred on Firefly, called national attention to the case made an important point about the University’s double standards on speech:

Baldwin (co-star of Firefly) wrote about Stout’s apparent double standard in censorship. Baldwin noted that earlier this year, Stout apparently had no problem with “Kill the Bill” posters based on the film Kill Bill, which depicted Uma Thurman with a sword and advocated against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.

The University folded, announcing that they have reversed their decision to limit Miller’s speech and will develop a new protocol for dealing with similar cases.

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