Brown

Opinion by Judge GRABER; Concurrence by Judge FERGUSON; Partial Concurrence and Partial Dissent by Judge REINHARDT.

*1095 OPINION

In this appeal, we consider the extent to which the First Amendment and due process guarantees are implicated when a graduate student’s thesis committee declines to approve a thesis that meets academic and professional standards in all respects except one: The acknowledgments section does not conform to established academic and professional standards. We conclude that the Amendment does not require university professors to assign a passing grade to such a thesis. We further hold that the university’s review procedures satisfied due process. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of Defendants, who are university professors and officials. However, we remand the case for the district court to address a state constitutional claim that it did not resolve.

FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

Plaintiff Christopher Brown was a master’s degree candidate in the Department of Material Sciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara (“UCSB”), a public university. In order to earn a master’s degree, Plaintiff was…

concurring in the affirmance of the District Court and the remand on state issues:

I agree that the plaintiffs First Amendment rights were not violated and express a reasoning different from both of my associates.

This case is about an erosion of academic integrity. To put it in the vernacular, the guy cooked the books (his master’s thesis), got caught, and now wants to *1109 shield his misbehavior under the umbrella of the First Amendment.

The plaintiff, in order to earn his master’s degree, presented his thesis to his faculty committee for its approval. The thesis did not include the optional acknowledgment section. The committee approved the thesis as presented to them. The university requires that graduate students must file their approved thesis in the university library as an additional requirement for earning their master’s degree.

Instead of submitting the approved copy of his thesis to the university library, the plaintiff, unknown to his thesis committee, added two pages of “Disacknowledg-ments,” containing vulgar language naming the persons he believed to be the “degenerates” who posed “an ever-present burden during my graduate career.... ”

The librarian refused to…

concurring in part and dissenting in part:

Although the underlying dispute may appear to some to be trivial, and perhaps not worthy of serious First Amendment deliberation, the extreme positions taken by the parties during the course of their disagreement and the erroneous legal rule advocated by one of my colleagues leaves me with little choice but to discuss the constitutional questions in some depth. I agree that we should affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment with respect to Brown’s procedural due process claim and that we should remand the state law claims for further consideration. I respectfully dissent, however, from my colleagues’ decision to affirm the award of *1110 summary judgment to the university with respect to Brown’s First Amendment claims.

First, I emphasize that there is no agreement between my colleagues in the majority as to the legal standard applicable to Brown’s First Amendment claims. Thus, there is no majority opinion and no binding precedent with respect to any First Amendment principles. Although Judges Graber and Ferguson reach the same conclusion, they do so for wholly different reasons. Judge Graber would apply the First Amendment…