MN Supreme Court to hear UMN Facebook free-speech case today
Arguments before the Minnesota Supreme Court are scheduled today for Tatro v. University of Minnesota, that Facebook-free-speech case I mentioned back in July.
The issue is whether the U should have been able to punish a mortuary-science student for posting crude/disturbing Facebook comments about a cadaver.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has its own take on the matter, the gist of which is:
The ruling that colleges seek—that they may punish speech, on campus or off, that they deem likely to undermine donor support—should alarm all of us. ... While colleges clearly may discipline students for off-campus criminal behavior, the idea that colleges have free-floating good-citizenship authority to punish lawful behavior that administrators subjectively deem "disruptive" is breathtaking in its potential for abuse.
Read the full commentary here.
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