Opinion ID: 3031198
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: application of pickering to hudson’s first

Text: AMENDMENT CLAIM
[4] The threshold issue we address is whether Hudson’s WTO protest activity involved a matter of public concern. The Supreme Court provided guidance on this point in United States v. National Treasury Employees Union, explaining that it had applied Pickering’s balancing test only when the employee spoke as a citizen upon matters of public concern rather than as an employee upon matters only of personal interest. Thus, private speech that involves nothing more than a complaint about a change in the employee’s own duties may give rise to discipline without imposing any special burden of justification on the government employer. 513 U.S. 454, 466 (1995) (internal alterations, quotations, and citations omitted) (emphasis in original). 4028 HUDSON v. CRAVEN [5] Although the Court recently acknowledged that “the boundaries of the public concern test are not well-defined,” City of San Diego v. Roe, 125 S.Ct. 521, 525 (2004), this case does not require us to explore the outer perimeters of the definition: “the standard for determining whether expression is of public concern is the same standard used to determine whether a common-law action for invasion of privacy is present.” Id. Thus, a “public concern is something that is a subject of legitimate news interest.” Id. at 525-26. [6] The WTO meeting and the issues surrounding it were quintessentially matters of public concern. That this event was newsworthy and had quite literally excited widespread public interest was not in dispute. Nothing in the record suggests that Hudson sought to associate with her students at the rally to voice any particular personal or private concerns. Instead, her stated purpose in participating in the demonstration was to express, in association with some of her students, her opinions about the role of the WTO in the global economy. Hudson’s speech and associational activities meet the public concern test.
[7] Hudson’s claim fails because her associational interests in this context are strongly outweighed by the legitimate administrative interests of Clark College. While Hudson’s freedom to participate in discussion about the WTO surely implicates core political speech, the actual curtailment of her First Amendment rights was minimal. Hudson was free to attend the anti-WTO rally on her own. She was free to communicate her views on the WTO to her students or to anyone else. She was free to associate with her students in the classroom on this matter. The only claimed abridgement of her First Amendment rights was that she was not permitted, under the de facto auspices of the College, to associate with a handful of students during a discrete event for a limited duration. HUDSON v. CRAVEN 4029 [8] The burden on Hudson’s First Amendment rights surely would have been problematic were she barred from ongoing participation in WTO advocacy or barred from general meetings outside the classroom with students interested in WTO issues. We acknowledge the Supreme Court’s admonition that “[e]ffective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association, as this Court has more than once recognized by remarking upon the close nexus between the freedoms of speech and assembly.” NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. at 460. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that the efficacy of Hudson’s advocacy was undermined by the limited restriction on associating with her students at the WTO rally. [9] Clark College has identified compelling interests for restricting Hudson’s association with her students at the antiWTO protest—the safety of students and pedagogical oversight. In weighing these interests, we must evaluate “any injury the speech could cause to the interest of the State, as an employer, in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.” Waters, 511 U.S. at 668 (internal quotations and citations omitted). The Supreme Court has “consistently given greater deference to government predictions of harm used to justify restriction of employee speech than to predictions of harm used to justify restrictions on the speech of the public at large.” Id. at 673. Thus, we give “substantial weight to government employers’ reasonable predictions of disruption, even when the speech involved is on a matter of public concern, and even though when the government is acting as sovereign our review of legislative predictions of harm is considerably less deferential.” Id. [10] Craven identified four legitimate interests of Clark College in imposing restrictions on Hudson’s right of association: 4030 HUDSON v. CRAVEN
group, and potential liability for the college, because of the reports of potential for violence;
have the benefit of access and networking with teachers; (3) mixing one’s politics with one’s professional responsibility in the classroom, which is a spe- cial trust; [and] (4) marginal benefit from participating in the demonstration. This litany boils down to two reasons—student safety and pedagogical oversight. While some of these justifications are more significant than others, on balance the legitimate interests of Clark College as an employer and educational institution outweigh those of Hudson to participate in the de facto field trip with her students. SAFETY RISK TO STUDENTS [11] Clark College has a strong argument that its safety concerns were not the post hoc justifications for Hudson’s firing that she claims they were. The justification proffered by the College was neither de minimis nor trumped up after the fact. Before the protest, the Vice President advised the faculty that her “major concern [was] the safety of students, as well as your safety.” The College was aware of law enforcement’s prediction about rioting and civil unrest, and a civil emergency was declared on the day of the protests. This concrete concern and cautionary approach, backed up by specifics, is easily distinguished from a situation where an “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance is not enough to overcome the right to freedom of expression.” Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Cmty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503, 508 (1969). HUDSON v. CRAVEN 4031 [12] Hudson’s argument that the College’s fears “proved to be unfounded as none of the students who attended the rally even witnessed any harm to any individuals there, much less suffered any themselves” misses the point. The court is not called upon to make a retrospective analysis of the College’s position, but instead to assess whether the stated justification for limiting Hudson’s association was reasonable at the time. The Ninth Circuit has held that “courts should not require government employers to demonstrate that an employee’s speech actually disrupted efficient office operation; rather, ‘reasonable predictions of disruption’ are sufficient.” Moran v. Washington, 147 F.3d 839, 846 (9th Cir. 1998) (citing Waters, 511 U.S. at 673). The potential for violence at the rallies was more than a wild card and the College was more than reasonable in being apprehensive about its students and faculty together attending protests of such novelty and scale in the face of warnings about rioting. PEDAGOGICAL OVERSIGHT [13] Clark College has a strong and recognized interest in maintaining its political neutrality as an educational institution. See Hazelwood Sch. Dist. v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260, 272 (1988) (“A school must also retain the authority to refuse . . . to associate the school with any position other than neutrality on matters of political controversy.”). Hazelwood arose in a high school and not a community college setting, but that does not change the fact that the decision of a public institution of higher education to avoid sanctioned political entanglement is a judgment that is best left to the institution. Although we draw from Hazelwood the principle that educational institutions have a strong pedagogical interest in avoiding institutional association with potentially divisive political issues, we need not consider whether a college necessarily has the same leeway as a high school to preserve that neutrality. The College’s concerns about political entanglement were especially pronounced in Hudson’s case because of the close 4032 HUDSON v. CRAVEN connection between the subject matter of her teaching and the political message of anti-WTO protesters. The field trip with her students, even though not billed as an “official trip,” was closely linked with her classroom teaching. Craven testified that “those students who elect[ed] to go may [have] perceive[d] that they [were] having [an] advantage in terms of access to the teacher . . . [and] that others who elect[ed] not to go might not have [an advantage] because of the power relationship that teachers have.” [14] As Craven feared, the students who accompanied Hudson to the rally probably did have an advantage on the final examination. In one major essay question, Hudson offered three options, two about union critiques of the WTO and one about a video on the Asian financial crisis, a movie that she apparently offered as an alternative to WTO subject matter. Indeed, Hudson told students before the trip to pick up information in Seattle as it “might be on the test.” Hudson’s conduct directly violated Jackson’s warning that “[t]here cannot be any connection [or] participation in this event to any grade or activity in the class” and “[s]tudents who do not participate in this activity cannot in any way be penalized in terms of grade or be required to do any extra activity to ‘make up’ for their lack of involvement.” As befitting a professor of economics, Craven testified that he was concerned with “the marginal benefit to the marginal cost” of the students taking a field trip to the anti-WTO rally. Craven, as the senior member of the department, opposed field trips for students in general because of the lost classroom time. In fact, he had a legitimate pedagogical interest in disputing Hudson’s conclusion about the educational value of attending the rally. Although Hudson argues that she and her students were not engaged in an official Clark College field trip, it was apparent that regardless of the trip’s label, Hudson viewed the experience as an educational opportunity for the students, one that she promoted through her teaching. HUDSON v. CRAVEN 4033 [15] Clark College has met its burden by demonstrating that its legitimate interests outweigh Hudson’s interest in attending the anti-WTO rally with her students. The College did not impermissibly infringe on Hudson’s First Amendment rights, and thus we need not reach the question whether Hudson’s termination was otherwise justified under Mt. Healthy. The district court properly dismissed Hudson’s § 1983 claim.2 AFFIRMED. 2 The district court also was correct in dismissing Hudson’s Washington law claim that the administrators “intentionally interfered with business expectancy between [Hudson] and Clark College by inducing or causing a termination of that business expectancy.” Under Washington law, “[a] party cannot tortiously interfere with its own contract.” Reninger v. Dep’t. of Corr., 951 P.2d 782, 788 (Wash. 1998).