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Do students have First Amendment rights at a private university, or can the university expel or punish students for saying something it doesn't like?
I don't understand why people need examples, but the cases I'm thinking of are (1) posting a controversial meme on the message board, or (2) questioning the concept of "microaggressions" during class (This latter case happened at a public university, but I wonder if it would be treated differently at a private one)
The First Amendment provides a student essentially no protection from discipline by a private university. Manhattan Cmty. Access Corp. v. Halleck, 139 S. Ct. 1921, 1928 (2019) ("The text and original meaning of those Amendments, as well as this Court's longstanding precedents, establish that the Free Speech Clause prohibits only governmental abridgment of speech. The Free Speech Clause does not prohibit private abridgment of speech."); Vaynberg v. Seton Hall Univ., No. CIV.A. 09-4999 FSH, 2010 WL 4510904, at *5 (D.N.J. Oct. 26, 2010) ("In order for the First Amendment to apply, the challenged conduct must be deemed 'state action.' Seton Hall is a private, Catholic university. ... Because there is no evidence from which a reasonable fact finder could conclude that Seton Hall's conduct relevant to this lawsuit was “state action,” Seton Hall is entitled to summary judgment.")
Some states, however, have passed laws requiring private schools to provide some of the protections of the First Amendment. The most robust of these is California's Leonard Law, which essentially requires private schools to adhere to the First Amendment. Other states also recognize some measure of free-speech rights for students at private institutions. For instance, both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey supreme courts have held that their state constitutions' free-speech clauses (which, unlike the First Amendment, say nothing about the government) protected peaceful protesters who distributed leaflets on the campuses of private colleges.
The First Amendment affects what the government can restrict. It does not prevent a private entity from restricting how its resources are used, imposing behaviour standards on their premises or choosing who they do business with.
There are limits to this- refusing service based on a protected class is illegal for example- but neither example given comes under this.
how its resources It seems like a stretch. It was literally a question in class (see the link)
It depends on just how "private" the university is. Generally this boils down to money and where its sourced from. While there are a number of universities that are private, a good majority of those do recieve public grant money from a government entity. Because of this, they must be compliant with the U.S. Constitution or risk losing the grants... which can be a large amount of money for the school. This isn't so much a restriction imposed on private schools so much as it is on government. Paying private entities to do what the government is constitutionally not allowed to do is unconstitutional... the private entity becomes a government one for purposes of Constitutional validity.
That said, there are schools that lack any government grant funding and are perfectly within their rights to have strict rules about what speech is permissible. Typically, these will involve some contract element to them so that it's the student voluntarily giving up a right rather than the school restricting them, under pain of expulsion if the student breaches the contract.
