Students' free speech rights on the move in the US

Normally, I try to keep blog posts very closely related to the theme of computers and society, but here's an article that underscores our discussion of the changing rules and norms of rules about free speech.

Texas cheerleader suing - didn't root for attacker

San Francisco Chronicle, November 5, 2010

Coles Notes (that's Cliff's Notes for us Americans): a court in the U.S. has declared groundless a high school student's objection to being forced to cheer for a player who assaulted her. The article includes an informative discussion and links about the steady shift in the U.S. judiciary's interpretation of free speech rights -- from favouring students' rights, to favouring institutions such as schools.

I was on the newspaper crew in high school (and thus one of the first non-university/military users of the Internet...) My teachers told me to take seriously the lessons on free speech, libel and attribution -- because the speech of students was constitutionally protected, and we had the power to enact real social change through our speech. I wonder if students today feel the same sense of empowerment and responsibility.

Anyway, in CPSC 430 we studied examples of how restrictions on electronic communications get determined by a host of factors: ethical arguments, social contract theory, Mill's Principle of Harm, and, perhaps more than we realize, cultural relativism. We saw that China's restrictions on speech on the Internet are motivated by factors that aren't so different from those that shape the laws in the U.S. and Canada -- CIPA, the Patriot Act, and PIPEDA are as much a product of the public concern of the moment, and nationalistic interests, as they are descended from universal moral laws of the kind Kant envisioned.

As UBC grads, you will be leaders and people will look to you for insight on technology. When it's your turn to decide what society should make of an emerging technology that we never imagined a few years prior, I hope you will remember CPSC 430 and take a broad view of the issues that determine society's complex relationship with information technology.