Campus (college and university) speech codes and the First Amendment (topic and - Research Paper Example

Because of the growing number of students using online communication and incidents involving students having been disciplined through the use of code of conduct in colleges and universities, it is important that there be an analysis made on the said issue. This paper will focus on public colleges and universities and cite some incidents wherein these institutions have disciplined their students based on a cyberspeech made. A presentation of case laws will then be made as to how the US Supreme Court, federal courts and district courts have ruled on First Amendment challenges on penalizing speeches on the basis of the codes of conduct.

An analysis will then be made as to the impact of these rulings and finally will attempt to conclude that there has been minimal guidance on how federal courts have addressed this specific issue (Beckstrom, 2008, p.261). Conduct codes for students are ground rules or guidelines promoted in various institutions “in an effort to maintain a safe, yet productive, campus environment” (Berenson, 2005, p. 803). The purpose of these conduct codes generally are the following: “(1) to guide student behavior and (2) to establish procedural mechanisms that safeguard the rights of the students accused of conduct that violates a campus code” (Bach, 2003, p.1). Since public colleges and universities are considered as state entities, they are obliged to follow the US Constitution by providing procedural due process and other rights to its students, (Goss v.

Lopez, 419 U.S. 565 (1975), including the right to free speech provided in the First Amendment of the US Constitution (Beckstrom, 2008, p. 261). However, there have been moves to “revisit student conduct codes” for the purpose of examining “whether off-campus conduct by students should be disciplined by the university” (DeJong & Vehige, 2008). This was to address the increasing “amount of purposeless