Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri

Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on March 19, 1973, held in a per curiam (unsigned) opinion that the expulsion of a student from a public university for distributing on campus a newspaper that contained what the university deemed “indecent speech” violated the student’s free speech rights under the First Amendment.

Facts of the case

Barbara Papish, a 32-year-old graduate student majoring in journalism at the University of Missouri, was expelled for distributing an issue of the Free Press Underground newspaper, published by the nonprofit Columbia Free Press Corporation. According to university officials, the paper contained forms of what they described as indecent speech. The newspaper had been sold on campus for more than four years with authorization from officials in the university’s business office. The issue of the newspaper in question was unacceptable to university officials because it included a political cartoon depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and the goddess of justice and an article with a title containing a vulgar expression. Papish was a staff member of the Free Press Underground.

The student, who had been pursuing a graduate degree for more than five years when the newspaper episode occurred, was on academic probation. After the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct decided that the student had violated a university bylaw prohibiting “indecent conduct or speech,” she was placed on disciplinary probation. The student subsequently exhausted her rights to review within the university after its chancellor and board of curators affirmed her expulsion. Although the student was allowed to remain on campus until the end of the semester, she was not given credit for the one course she passed.

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Papish unsuccessfully filed suit in a federal district court in Missouri, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief pursuant to the Civil Rights Act of 1871 (a law that was enacted to fight discrimination against African Americans during Reconstruction), asserting that she was expelled for activities protected by the First Amendment. The district court found in favour of the university, and the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit affirmed that decision.

The Supreme Court’s ruling

In its ruling, the Supreme Court reversed the decisions of the district and appellate courts. The Court noted that the Eighth Circuit’s ruling had come just before its own judgment in Healy v. James (1972), in which it held that officials at public colleges and universities have the ability and a responsibility to enforce reasonable rules governing student conduct. Yet, acknowledging its preceding decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District (1969), in which it had upheld the free speech rights of high-school students who wore black armbands to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War, the Court pointed out that college and university campuses are not closed societies that are immune to the sweep of the First Amendment.

In Healy the Court ruled that officials had overstepped their bounds by forbidding students from organizing a local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) on the grounds that such an organization might have caused a disruption on campus. On that basis, the Supreme Court in Papish argued that the mere dissemination of offensive ideas is an insufficient ground on which to bar student groups from campuses. The Court thus made it clear that the propagation of ideas on a state university campus, regardless of their offensiveness, cannot be proscribed in the name of “conventions of decency,” as the Eighth Circuit had described that interest in its contrary ruling. The Court, relying on its own precedent in free speech cases in noneducation contexts, was clear that neither the political cartoon nor the title was legally obscene or unprotected under the First Amendment. The Court concluded that, in expelling the student because of the content of the newspaper rather than because of the time, place, or manner of its distribution on campus, university officials had acted unconstitutionally.