The Avery Doninger case, Connecticut’s contribution to the death of speech for students, has taken yet another turn for the worst according to the New Haven Register.

[Doninger lawyer Jon] Schoenhorn noted Doninger wrote the characterization on her personal blog at home. But in his ruling, issued Jan. 15, Kravitz said in the new age of the Internet, “Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.”

Kravitz also wrote, “Today, students are connected to each other through e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, social networking sites and text messages. An e-mail can be sent to dozens or hundreds of other students by hitting ‘send.’”

Whenever a judge refers to the “new age of the internet,” you can be assured that something bad is about to come.  It’s not the judges don’t like the internet, or don’t use the internet, but they don’t understand the internet and they most assuredly have no respect for it.  Very few judges are of the age that they surf.  Instead, their children surf, or maybe even their grandchildren.  Anything your children or grandchildren do is a game.  It’s not serious.  Whatever pastimes judges enjoy is worthy.  Kids play games.  Argue that golf is a waste of time and a game for idiots, and see how many friends you make in the federal judiciary.

In ruling Judge Mark Kravitz quietly turned the law on its head, all because of the internet.  “Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse.”  Not exactly, but close enough to reality to let pass.  The fact that speech, published on the internet, is theoretically accessible anywhere anytime does not make it on-campus anymore than a book published 300 years ago on another continent that sits on the library shelf is transformed into on-campus speech. 

The problem is the paradigm, where accessibility to information is no longer controlled exclusively by the grown-ups, and they just can’t stand it.  Having children, I completely understand, but the solution isn’t to demand that the paradigm shift back to something that fits our past way of thinking, but to adopt to changing realities.  If I can’t control the internet (and I can’t), then I teach my children to exercise good judgment and act accordingly.  I don’t punish them because the world is changing.

The old paradigm as created in Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969), holding that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”  This oft-quoted line, of course, hides the true holding, which is that speech changes from free to severely limited as a student passes through those very gates.

The “school gates” language is more than a mere quaint image, a throwback to the days when teachers rapped knuckles with a yardstick.  It provided a physical line for all to see, where the free speech rights of young people turned into the restricted speech rights of students.  According to Judge Kravitz, the internet obliterated this physical line, and in a peculiar way, he’s right.  Communication in the internet again transcends physical boundaries.

Where Judge Kravitz goes wrong is his mistaken effort to extend the restrictions within the gates to the world without, not because free speech for the young is any less precious a right, or because the 1st Amendment to the Constitution contains a hidden, super-secret clause readable only by judges and teachers that eviscerates speech that they don’t like.  Rather, when the schoolhouse gates no longer mark the real world from the school world, then the importance of allowing school officials to control the speech of the young trumps the limitations that once constrained their limited sphere of control.  In short, those gates gave kids a world to speak their mind, and allowed the schools their own turf to control.  Judge Kravitz gave school officials the rest of the universe when he tore the gates down.

As a matter of general principle, one might suppose that freedom of speech would be the ideal that a federal judge would feel most worthy of protection, it being all constitutional and such, rather than the overarching need for school officials to assert control.  Yet Judge Kravitz has chosen to elevate school administration control over the Constitution, a curious choice. 

But is it a choice that was necessary?  Clearly, Judge Kravitz felt that the “schoolhouse gates” analogy fails in the internet age and reflects an archaic barrier to school administration control.  It’s hardly that clear.  Information, communication and speech, as carried on paper, by mouth and in the hearts and minds of students, never respected this firm line.  The difference now isn’t the barrier, but that school administrators were able to learn of out-of-school speech due to their own internet access that historically would have been beyond their purview.  What the internet did was allow administrators to read the communications between students that would previously have been whispered only when they were out of earshot.

Thus, the real distinction is not that the internet has obliterated the “schoolhouse gates” boundary from the student side, but allowed school officials to eavesdrop on their students outside communications, to learn things that had always happened but were previously never available to them.  That these communications have hurt the feelings of the most fragile groups of pseudo-adults around, and thus compelled these officials to do whatever they could to control student thought wherever it happened, hardly seems like much of a reason to end free speech for the young.  Frankly, it seems like a great opportunity to tell school administrators to get a grip and grow up.  Do they think that students will love and respect them because they can smack a student who thinks otherwise?

Neither school administrators, nor a federal judge, is going to stop young people from thinking, and expressing their thoughts to others.  While it makes some sense to allow school officials to keep this out of the hallways, if for no reason than they are expected to maintain a degree of decorum for the protection of those students for whom it would interfere with learning, they cannot control the universe no matter how dearly they might try.  Nor should they. 

If it pains school officials to learn what Avery Doninger thinks of them, don’t look for it and don’t read it.  But the wholesale evisceration of free speech in the name of school administrative control turns respective rights on their heads, and the problem isn’t technology but school administrator sensibility.  If they don’t like what students have to say, either behave better or stop reading.  Don’t blame the transmittal mechanics because someone thinks you’re a douchebag.

And Judge Kravitz really needs to figure out which side of the Constitution demands the protection of a federal judge, no matter how deferential he feels toward school officials.  If he doesn’t care for the schoolhouse gates analogy anymore, let him come up with a better one.  But don’t give school officials the universe.