Exerpts From the Southworth Decision

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
March 22, 2000

BOARD OF REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM,
PETITIONER v. SCOTT HAROLD SOUTHWORTH et al.
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court

"The First Amendment permits a public university to charge its students an activity fee used to fund a program to facilitate extracurricular student speech if the program is viewpoint neutral."

Court acknowledges "vast, unexplored bounds" for student activities funding.

"The speech the University seeks to encourage in the program before us is distinguished not by discernable limits but by its vast, unexplored bounds. To insist upon asking what speech is germane would be contrary to the very goal the University seeks to pursue. It is not for the Court to say what is or is not germane to the ideas to be pursued in an institution of higher learning."

The marketplace of ideas must be open to unpopular viewpoints.

"It is all but inevitable that the fees will result in subsidies to speech which some students find objectionable and offensive to their personal beliefs."

Dynamic student activities further the educational mission of the university.

"The University may determine that its mission is well served if students have the means to engage in dynamic discussions of philosophical, religious, scientific, social, and political subjects in their extracurricular campus life outside the lecture hall. If the University reaches this conclusion, it is entitled to impose a mandatory fee to sustain an open dialogue to these ends."

Universities must simply conduct a viewpoint neutral allocation process.

"The University must provide some protection to its students' First Amendment interests, however. The proper measure, and the principal standard of protection for objecting students, we conclude, is the requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the allocation of funding support."

"When a university requires its students to pay fees to support the extracurricular speech of other students, all in the interest of open discussion, it may not prefer some viewpoints to others."

Court allows off-campus student speech and expression to receive funding.

"We make no distinction between campus activities and the off-campus expressive activities of objectionable [student organizations]."

"We find no principled way, however, to impose upon the University, as a constitutional matter, a requirement to adopt geographic or spatial restrictions as a condition for RSOs' entitlement to reimbursement. Universities possess significant interests in encouraging students to take advantage of the social, civic, cultural, and religious opportunities available in surrounding communities and throughout the country. Universities, like all of society, are finding that traditional conceptions of territorial boundaries are difficult to insist upon in an age marked by revolutionary changes in communications, information transfer, and the means of discourse. If the rule of viewpoint neutrality is respected, our holding affords the University latitude to adjust its extracurricular student speech program to accommodate these advances and opportunities."