Student journalists in Ohio and neighboring states lost some of their First Amendment protection as a result of an appellate court decision filed Wednesday.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals - the federal appeals court for Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee - upheld the lower court decision in Kincaid vs. Gibson, and granted university administrators the power to decide content and design of student publications.

"This case does a 180 degree turn from a consistent body of case law saying college journalists have First Amendment protection," said Mike Heistand, staff attorney for the Student Press Law Center. "We were stunned, frankly, by the ruling."

The plaintiffs now have the option to request a re-hearing with the full-judge panel, Heistand said. That request will be filed within the next month.

The case deals with the 1995 confiscation of 2,000 student yearbooks by Kentucky State University officials. Both the district court and the appellate court ruled in favor of the university based on a precedent established in Hazelwood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, a 1988 Supreme Court case dealing with high school media.

After the first Kincaid ruling, all public colleges in Ohio and Kentucky filed briefs in support of the KSU yearbook staff.

But because the court ruled the yearbook is not a public forum, KSU administrators continued with the suit.

"The university has never and will never consider the yearbook a public forum," said KSU legal council Harold Greene of the most recent ruling.

In the opinion filed by the panel of three judges, the majority cited "the yearbook's failure to accomplish its intended purpose," and the "undisputedly poor quality" of the Thorobred, KSU's student yearbook, as sufficient reason for the university to confiscate and withhold distribution of the book.

This legal reasoning is weak at best, Heistand said.

"We have never allowed the government to confiscate publications on such arbitrary grounds," he said.

One member of the appellate panel also disagreed with his colleagues' ruling. In a dissenting opinion, Judge R. Guy Cole wrote, "I believe that the university's proffered reasons for withholding distribution of the yearbook...are content-based restrictions that do not serve any compelling governmental interest."

For some educators and legal experts, these content-based restrictions add up to censorship.

"When you live in a society where censorship is okay, it shuts out voices that are important," said Eddith Dashiell, assistant director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. "Information is power, and whomever controls the information has the power."

Another concern is whether OU's student publications could be restricted in the future. This ruling allows college and university administrators to manage any publication they feel is not a public forum under the law.

"The question now is whether the Athena is comparable to the Thorobred as a non-public forum," Dashiell said.

Whatever the comparison, the university has no plans to alter its policy at this time, said John Burns, OU director of legal affairs.

"Our policy for a long time has been to be as flexible and open as we can be to student's views and expressions," Burns said. "No one has had any substantive conversation about changing our policy toward student publications."

These types of promises from university administration do nothing to quiet worries of some OU students.

"Why do college administrators think they control what we as adults publish?" said freshman journalism major Hillary Kopsey. "It is a total violation of the First Amendment."

Senior Kristen Elias, copy editor at OU's Athena Yearbook, said she also finds fault with the ruling.

"I think that the criteria on which the yearbook was judged were ridiculous," Elias said.