Here’s a pop quiz for you. Which of the following three things is the only one allowed at all public high schools and colleges in America?

A. Wearing an arm band in protest of a war.

B. Writing a newspaper article about teen pregnancy.

C. Choosing a purple cover for a yearbook, against administrators’ wishes.

If you answered A, you’re the big winner.

In late 1968, the case Tinker vs. Des Moines School District was brought before the Supreme Court. The case was about three students who wore black armbands to different schools in Des Moines in protest of the Vietnam War.

Administrators had heard about the students’ plans, so two days before the kids wore the armbands, the Des Moines principals adopted a policy prohibiting students from coming to school wearing armbands. The kids were sent home, and they sued the school district.

The Supreme Court found for Tinker, saying that students can in fact engage in free speech as long as they are not disrupting the school environment.

In one of the most famous lines from any Supreme Court decision this century, Justice Abe Fortas wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Amen to that.

The 30-year anniversary of this landmark decision was celebrated this weekend at a Drake University symposium. Many intellectual leaders, including Nadine Strossen, the president of the American Civil Liberties Union, sang the praises of the case that guaranteed rights for students.

But many other leaders at the symposium, not to mention judges across the country, seem to have forgotten how important student rights are.

One woman at the symposium, Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute, was quoted in The Des Moines Register as saying the Tinker case prevents educators from teaching students how to maturely engage in debate.

Huh? Allowing students to speak their minds keeps them from learning how to debate?

Doesn’t seem to make much sense, does it?

Neither does allowing educators to control articles in a high school newspaper. But that’s exactly what a more recent Supreme Court case, Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, did.

In Hazelwood, two pages of a high school newspaper were removed because they contained articles about teen pregnancy and divorce. The administrators thought the articles were “objectionable,” so they simply took out the pages.

Now, you would think that would go against everything the court had said just 19 years earlier in Tinker. But the court thought otherwise and found in favor of the Hazelwood School District.

So now, whenever high school administrators can show that they have a “valid educational purpose for their censorship” or the censorship is necessary to prevent disruption of school activities, they can censor the student press.

Although students don’t lose their constitutional rights just because they’re at school, they do if they print something administrators don’t like.

Even worse, — if it can get any worse — is that now the Hazelwood standard is being applied to colleges.

In the case Kincaid vs. Gibson, decided just last month by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, administrators at Kentucky State University censored and confiscated 2,000 yearbooks because the cover of the yearbook was purple — not the university’s colors of gold and green — and the content of the yearbook did not “maintain [the university’s] image to potential students, alumni and the general public.”

Citing Hazelwood, the court found that the university could censor not only the high school press but also the college press.

This case has not been decided by the Supreme Court, but it most likely will be.

So, will the Supreme Court return to the Tinker standard, so celebrated last weekend? Or will it turn from that and continue the recent precedent of robbing students of their rights as soon as they enter their schools?

Time will only tell how many rights students actually have. With any luck, when the Supreme Court decides Kincaid vs. Gibson, it will remember the words of another justice, William Brennan:

“‘The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.’ The classroom is peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.'”

Amen to that, too.

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Sara Ziegler is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Sioux Falls, S.D. She is editor in chief of the Daily.