218
Syllabus
portion of the fee used to fund RSO's engaged in political or ideological expression.
Held:
1. The First Amendment permits a public university to charge its students an activity fee used to fund a program to facilitate extracurricular student speech, provided that the program is viewpoint neutral. The University exacts the fee at issue for the sole purpose of facilitating the free and open exchange of ideas by, and among, its students. Objecting students, however, may insist upon certain safeguards with respect to the expressive activities they are required to support. The Court's public forum cases are instructive here by close analogy. Because the complaining students must pay fees to subsidize speech they find objectionable, even offensive, the rights acknowledged in Abood and Keller are implicated. In those cases, this Court held that a required service fee paid by nonunion employees to a union, Abood, supra, at 213, and fees paid by lawyers who were required to join a state bar association, Keller, supra, at 13-14, could be used to fund speech germane to those organizations' purposes but not to fund the organizations' own political expression. While these precedents identify the protesting students' interests, their germane speech standard is unworkable in the context of student speech at a university and gives insufficient protection both to the objecting students and to the University program itself. Even in the union context, this Court has encountered difficulties in deciding what is germane and what is not. The standard becomes all the more unmanageable in the public university setting, particularly where, as here, the State undertakes to stimulate the whole universe of speech and ideas. To insist upon asking what speech is germane would be contrary to the very goal the University seeks to pursue. The vast extent of permitted expression also underscores the high potential for intrusion on the objecting students' First Amendment rights, for it is all but inevitable that the fees will subsidize speech that some students find objectionable or offensive. A university is free to protect those rights by allowing an optional or refund system, but such a system is not a constitutional requirement. If a university determines that its mission is well served if students have the means to engage in dynamic discussion on a broad range of issues, it may impose a mandatory fee to sustain such dialogue. It must provide some protection to its students' First Amendment interests, however. The proper measure, and the principal standard of protection for objecting students, is the requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the allocation of funding support. This obligation was given substance in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., supra, which concerned a student's right to use an extracurricular speech program already in place. The instant case considers the antecedent question whether a public university may require stu-
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