Tag: Winter 2000-01

One college president said he gave the order to confiscate student newspapers because of factual errors and fear of copyright infringement.

Ian Lake called his principal "the town drunk." Ryan Lathouwers designed a Web site where users made anonymous submissions ridiculing a professor's sexual orientation.

Brian Condradt said 11 of his teachers worshipped Satan, while Justin Swidler likened his math teacher to Adolf Hitler.

And Joey Harrison and eight of his friends published a parody paper threatening to rape "the most fucked up teacher" on campus.

The common thread: They all ended up in court, facing charges of libel and invasion of privacy by those from whom they are supposed to learn. One case was dismissed.

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TEXAS -- The Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District must release student directory information to the public, according to a ruling by the state attorney general's office in July.

The district had said in April that it would no longer release the information because of concerns about confidentiality and vendors using the data to solicit students.

WISCONSIN -- Almost nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision affirming the constitutionality of mandatory student activity fee systems at the University of Wisconsin, a district court judge ruled that the university

MARYLAND -- A battle that began with a letter of reprimand from\nthe school president to the student newspaper adviser at Mount St.

CALIFORNIA -- The Department of Education began a full-blown investigation of University of California System schools' compliance with campus security regulations in October after a Sacramento newspaper published a series of articles claiming the schools were not accurately reporting campus crime statistics.

KENTUCKY -- While the frustration of waiting for a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in the Kentucky State University yearbook and newspaper adviser censorship case continues, lawyers for the school may be the only ones still smiling.

Documents obtained from the university by the Student Press Law Center indicate that the university had -- as of April 22 -- spent more than $60,000 to defend against charges that it had illegally confiscated the student yearbook and transferred the student media adviser to a secretarial position for refusing to censor the student newspaper.

ARKANSAS -- A junior high school student in the Pulaski County School District was expelled for one year in September because of profane writing he did at home -- but a federal judge reinstated him less than two weeks later, ruling the school district violated the student's First Amendment rights.

In September, U.S.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Department of Education has found that about 340 colleges have violated the federal Campus Security Act since the law was enacted in 1991, according to the national watchdog organization Security on Campus.

Few schools have been punished, however, for failing to comply with the law, renamed the Jeanne Clery Act in 1998, requiring schools to publish annual crime statistics and make their police or security logs open to the public.