'Damn,' 'Hell,' Poetry, and the Ninth-Grader

From Eugene Volokh's blog:

Jacob Behymer-Smith is a ninth-grader at the Coral Academy of Science, a public charter school in Nevada. He's participating in the Poetry Out Loud contest, which is run by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, and in which high school students compete at reciting a great poem that they've memorized. Behymer-Smith chose W.H. Auden's The More Loving One; so far, he's progressed from his school competition to a district-wide competition, in which he placed first. On April 22, he'll be competing in the Nevada statewide competition. You'd think that the Coral Academy's officials would be happy for him, and would be trying to support him.

You'd be mistaken, because — horror of horrors — Auden's poem, it turns out, contains unspeakable vulgarities. To be precise, it contains the words "hell" ("Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That, for all they care, I can go to hell") and "damn" ("Admirer as I think I am / Of stars that do not give a damn"). That, the Dean of Students at the Coral Academy opined, is "inappropriate language," as opposed to the "pristine language" (her words) that she thinks ought to be presented to the school's students.

And because of this, the school insisted on April 7, Jacob couldn't perform his poem. Not at the school; that happened already, which is what prompted the Dean of Students' initial "pristine[ness]" objection. No, school officials said, Jacob is prohibited from speak the words "hell" and "damn" at the district-wide competition at the Governor's Mansion in Carson City.

A federal district court intervened, finding that

this speech isn't the sort of "lewd" and "vulgar and offensive" speech that the Supreme Court has held that schools have the power to restrict (at least on-campus).

So Jacob gets to recite Auden's poem. Isn't it a little sad that in order to be granted his speech rights, he had to go to court?

Comments

[Rover Random]

Indeed.