Universities That Target Their Students’ Free Speech Should Have To Pay A Public Price For It

The University of Tennessee was asking for it

Let’s end a bad month with some good news.

From a New York Times article by Anemona Hartocollis:

A month after Kimberly Diei enrolled as a doctor of pharmacy student at the University of Tennessee, the college’s professional conduct committee received an anonymous complaint about her posts on social media.

The college reviewed her posts, which included racy rap lyrics and tight dresses, and concluded that they were vulgar and unprofessional. It threatened to expel her.

For the last four years, Ms. Diei has been fighting her school in court, arguing that her posts were fun and sex-positive, and unconnected to her status as a student. Now she has won a settlement: On either Wednesday or Thursday, she expects to receive a check for $250,000 — both vindication and relief, she said.

Hartocollis goes on to write that Diei got her degree and now works as a pharmacist at a Walgreens in Memphis. Happy endings all around.

It’s shocking how audacious public universities can be about this sort of thing — the extent to which they will pursue “investigations” or disciplinary acts against students for what would clearly seem to be protected speech (given that public university students are generally protected by the First Amendment). But “clearly seems to be” can take you only so far if you don’t have access to legal recourse. Diei was very fortunate to have pro bono help from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Disclosure: Katie Herzog and I were keynote speakers at FIRE’s student conference this past summer, in exchange for sweet, sweet American dollars. But I’ve been a big fan of the organization since long before I took any money from it.), but there were some twists and turns nonetheless: The article notes that “Ms. Diei’s complaint was initially dismissed by the district court where she filed it. She appealed, and the appellate court found last September that her speech ‘was clearly protected by the First Amendment,’ and permitted the case to go forward.”

A lot of universities act similarly to cowardly, risk-averse corporations. Their response to the sort of whiny narc who “reports” someone’s social media posts sometimes defaults to “OH MY GOD WE ARE SO SORRY WHAT CAN WE DO TO MAKE YOU FEEL LESS OFFENDED??” That is: They’re not going to do the right thing out of loyalty to their students, or out of a principled stance on free speech. They’re going to do the right thing when it becomes too expensive, from a monetary or public-relations perspective, to do the wrong thing.