Opinion ID: 775784
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Academic Freedom Claim

Text: 4 It has been clear long before 1994, when the Defendants' termination of Vega occurred, that neither teachers nor students shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech... at the schoolhouse gate. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503, 506 (1969). Although pre-1994 cases had outlined some guideposts concerning the free speech rights of a college professor to express his views in a classroom, see Dube v. State University of New York, 900 F.2d 587 (2d Cir. 1990), and the free speech rights of students to express their views, see Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 U.S. 260 (1988), the available authorities did not settle with certainty the extent to which a college professor could be disciplined for permitting student speech in a classroom to exceed reasonable bounds of discourse. The authority of educational administrators to take actions reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns, id. at 273, leaves room for uncertainty. Two years after the action challenged in this case, the Ninth Circuit observed that [n]either the Supreme Court nor this Circuit has determined what scope of First Amendment protection is to be given to a public college professor's classroom speech. Cohen, 92 F.3d at 971. 5 In the pending case, a college teacher has been disciplined for permitting a classroom exercise, initiated for legitimate pedagogical purposes, to continue to the point and beyond where students are calling out a series of vulgar, sexually explicit words and phrases, many of which the professor writes on the blackboard, either in words or with initials. We must determine whether, in light of then-existing law, college administrators could reasonably believe that they were not violating the teacher's First Amendment rights by disciplining him for such conduct. 6 Not surprisingly, no decision before 1994 (and none since) had clearly established that conduct of the sort that Vega undisputedly took violated a teacher's First Amendment rights. Although qualified immunity is not available simply because the precise conduct at issue has not been previously held unlawful, see Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640, the available precedents that might usefully have guided the Defendants leave the unlawfulness of their action at least unclear. Dube, much relied on by the Plaintiff, upheld the right of a teacher, in a course on racism, to express the view that Zionism was a form of racism. See Dube, 900 F.2d at 589, 598. Protection was accorded despite the offensiveness of the teacher's viewpoint to some students and some members of the community. Dube serves as a caution to governmental administrators not to discipline a college teacher for expressing controversial, even offensive, views lest a pall of orthodoxy inhibit the free exchange of ideas in the classroom. See Keyishian, 385 U.S. at 603. Vega's toleration of the students' shouted vulgarities was far removed from Dube's expression of his political views. 7 Somewhat more pertinent is the decision of the First Circuit in Keefe v. Geanakos, 418 F.2d 359 (1st Cir. 1969). A teacher was protected in assigning to a high school senior English class a scholarly article that used the word mother-fucker and explained its origin. See id. at 360- 61. The teacher was careful to offer an alternate assignment to any student who found the assigned material offensive. See id. at 361. Keefe makes clear that a teacher may not be disciplined simply because a vulgar word is contained and discussed in assigned materials, at least for students of suitable age. A contrary decision would have left teachers vulnerable to discipline for assigning many well regarded literary works. However, the vulgarities Vega permitted to be called out in his classroom were not part of an etymological exploration, nor was the scene in which all of the students but one were yelling their contributions, with two standing on chairs, an academic discussion. 8 Particularly pertinent is our Circuit's decision in Silano v. Sag Harbor Board of Education, 42 F.3d 719 (2d Cir. 1994), decided the same year as the episode at issue here. 6 A teacher was denied protection because of the materials he included in a tenth-grade mathematics class for the purpose of illustrating what he called the persistence of vision phenomenon. See id. at 721. Of the six 35 mm. film clips he distributed to his students, one portrayed two woman naked above the waist. See id. We ruled that the school officials' action in barring the teacher from the classroom was reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns. Id. at 723. We pointed out that [d]epictions of bare-chested women were entirely unnecessary to illustrate th[e] scientific phenomenon that the teacher wished to explain. Id. Although Vega's students were high school graduates in a pre-college program and thus two years beyond those in Sag Harbor, the students' shouting of vulgarities was as unnecessary to his clustering exercise as Silano's film clip was to his explanation of a scientific phenomenon. 7 9 Since this episode occurred seven years ago and involves a highly unusual set of circumstances, unlikely to be repeated, we see no reason to rule definitively on whether the Defendants' action was unlawful. For purposes of the pending appeal, we rule only that on the state of the law in 1994, the Defendants could reasonably believe that in disciplining Vega for not exercising professional judgment to terminate the episode, they were not violating his clearly established First Amendment academic freedom rights. Even though no students complained, what students will silently endure is not the measure of what a college must tolerate or what administrators may reasonably think that a college need not tolerate.