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BOARD OF REGENTS OF UNIV. OF WIS. SYSTEM
v. SOUTHWORTH
Opinion of the Court

ernment regulation and judicial involvement, we have en-
countered difﬁculties in deciding what is germane and what
is not. The difﬁculty manifested itself in our decision in
Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Assn., 500 U. S. 507 (1991), where
different Members of the Court reached varying conclusions
regarding what expressive activity was or was not germane
to the mission of the association.
If it is difﬁcult to deﬁne
germane speech with ease or precision where a union or bar
association is the party, the standard becomes all the more
unmanageable in the public university setting, particularly
where the State undertakes to stimulate the whole universe
of speech and ideas.

The speech the University seeks to encourage in the pro-
gram before us is distinguished not by discernable limits but
by its vast, unexplored bounds. To insist upon asking what
speech is germane would be contrary to the very goal the
It is not for the Court to say
University seeks to pursue.
what is or is not germane to the ideas to be pursued in an
institution of higher learning.

Just as the vast extent of permitted expression makes the
test of germane speech inappropriate for intervention, so too
does it underscore the high potential for intrusion on the
First Amendment rights of the objecting students.
It is all
but inevitable that the fees will result in subsidies to speech
which some students ﬁnd objectionable and offensive to their
personal beliefs.
If the standard of germane speech is inap-
plicable, then, it might be argued the remedy is to allow each
student to list those causes which he or she will or will not
support.
If a university decided that its students’ First
Amendment interests were better protected by some type of
optional or refund system it would be free to do so. We
decline to impose a system of that sort as a constitutional
requirement, however. The restriction could be so disrup-
tive and expensive that the program to support extracurricu-
lar speech would be ineffective. The First Amendment does
not require the University to put the program at risk.