Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 293

529US1

Unit: $U39

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BOARD OF REGENTS OF UNIV. OF WIS. SYSTEM
v. SOUTHWORTH
Syllabus

portion of the fee used to fund RSO’s engaged in political or ideologi-
cal expression.

Held:

1. The First Amendment permits a public university to charge its
students an activity fee used to fund a program to facilitate extracurric-
ular student speech, provided that the program is viewpoint neutral.
The University exacts the fee at issue for the sole purpose of facilitating
the free and open exchange of ideas by, and among, its students. Ob-
jecting students, however, may insist upon certain safeguards with re-
spect to the expressive activities they are required to support. The
Court’s public forum cases are instructive here by close analogy. Be-
cause the complaining students must pay fees to subsidize speech they
ﬁnd objectionable, even offensive, the rights acknowledged in Abood and
Keller are implicated.
In those cases, this Court held that a required
service fee paid by nonunion employees to a union, Abood, supra, at 213,
and fees paid by lawyers who were required to join a state bar associa-
tion, Keller, supra, at 13–14, could be used to fund speech germane to
those organizations’ purposes but not to fund the organizations’ own
political expression. While these precedents identify the protesting
students’ interests, their germane speech standard is unworkable in the
context of student speech at a university and gives insufﬁcient protec-
tion both to the objecting students and to the University program itself.
Even in the union context, this Court has encountered difﬁculties in
deciding what is germane and what is not. The standard becomes all
the more unmanageable in the public university setting, particularly
where, as here, the State undertakes to stimulate the whole universe of
speech and ideas. To insist upon asking what speech is germane would
be contrary to the very goal the University seeks to pursue. The vast
extent of permitted expression also underscores the high potential for
intrusion on the objecting students’ First Amendment rights, for it is
all but inevitable that the fees will subsidize speech that some students
ﬁnd objectionable or offensive. A university is free to protect those
rights by allowing an optional or refund system, but such a system is
If a university determines that its
not a constitutional requirement.
mission is well served if students have the means to engage in dynamic
discussion on a broad range of issues, it may impose a mandatory fee to
sustain such dialogue.
It must provide some protection to its students’
First Amendment interests, however. The proper measure, and the
principal standard of protection for objecting students, is the require-
ment of viewpoint neutrality in the allocation of funding support. This
obligation was given substance in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors
of Univ. of Va., supra, which concerned a student’s right to use an extra-
curricular speech program already in place. The instant case considers
the antecedent question whether a public university may require stu-