Earlier this year, I posted about a new case we filed against Oregon State University officials because of their censorship of an independent student newspaper on campus.

As a refresher, the students in this case discovered one day last winter that all of their distribution bins on campus were missing.  Believing they were stolen, they contacted the police, who investigated the matter and found that no contrarian thieves were responsible for the missing bins and papers (as has been the case at many other schools)—instead, it was the OSU administration.   The students were informed of the location of their bins and arrived at a storage yard to discover this:

OSU’s purported reasons for this are detailed in my previous post, but in summary, they just didn’t add up.  For months, the students tried fruitlessly to convince the administration to allow them to put their bins back on campus.  Once it was clear that the university intended to simply ignore the students’ pleas for equal treatment, we filed the lawsuit in federal court.

The good news is that after being sued, the university finally relented, changed their policy, and allowed The Liberty to replace their distribution bins on campus, giving them access equal to the other student newspaper on campus.   The bad news is that despite the fact that the paper’s distribution bins were banned from most areas of campus for nearly an entire year pursuant to OSU’s policy, the judge found that the students had suffered no constitutional harm and dismissed the case.

We believe that the law is clear that a state university’s year-long period of censorship of student journalists constitutes a violation of their First Amendment rights.  We trust that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will agree.

I just blogged this week about how one of the greatest threats to free speech is the campus speech code and in particular, those codes that prohibit “hostile environment harassment.” UCLA School of Law Professor Eugene Volokh agreed in a recent interview with reason.tv, as pointed out on FIRE’s blog:

reason: If you had to choose one or two of the biggest threats to free speech these days, what would they be?

Volokh: One is the notion of hostile environment harassment: that people expressing their views, people making jokes, sometimes people posting sexually themed material, sometimes people making political statements or religious proselytizing, can become legally punishable discrimination simply because it is—and I’m quoting here the very vague language of the law—“severe or pervasive enough to create a hostile, abusive, or offensive environment” based on race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, and the like. This could be in employment, in education, in public accommodations. There is the limitation that it can support a lawsuit only if it creates a hostile environment for a reasonable person, but it’s obviously a very vague and very broad standard. 

Volokh is right. Such policies have been repeatedly used by universities to punish unpopular student speech. But the ADF Center for Academic Freedom has been instrumental in removing such vague policies at Temple University, Los Angeles City College, San Francisco State University, Yuba College, and Spokane Falls Community College. If university officials continue to employ such policies, we’ll continue to knock them down until the public university campus is again, a place where students and professors can inquire, study, and speak without fear of reprisal.

I don’t get surprised very often when I read the latest academic news. But today, I was. A university actually took a strong stand against the disruptive tactics of a student group bent on silencing campus speech.

In February of this year, Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, visited the campus of the University of California at Irvine (UCI) to deliver a lecture titled, “U.S.-Israel Relations from a Political and Personal Perspective.” During the lecture, students from the Muslim Student Union interrupted him repeatedly by shouting him down and at times calling him a “killer.” Ultimately, the Ambassador was forced to stop speaking. You can see video from the event here and read UCI’s detailed investigation of the event here.

This is just the latest in a long line of campus incidents in which student organizations have disrupted or even assaulted speakers to silence their message. Interestingly, each incident has been spearheaded by leftist students or student groups in order to shut down speech that does not conform to the prevailing left-leaning political mindset. This has been the undeniable pattern when students rushed the stage at Columbia University to stop Jim Gilchrist, scuttled Tom Tancredo’s immigration speech at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, desecrated the pro-life “Cemetery of the Innocents” display at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and threw pies at David Horowitz, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter at Ball State University, Western Michigan University, and the University of Arizona, respectively.

What has not been characteristic of such disruptions however, is an appropriate university response. Often university officials will overlook their own policies prohibiting disruption and merely descry the student response with a hollow invocation to tolerance and free speech. Such non-responses merely embolden further violence and chill the speech of all but the stoutest of heart. But UCI distinguished itself by actually disciplining the Muslim Student Union for its planned and coordinated disruption of Ambassador Oren’s speech. UCI suspended the group for a year and imposed fifty hours of community service. In doing so, UCI sent a message that it will not tolerate a “heckler’s veto” on free speech. The Muslim Student Union has—as do all student groups— the right to counter speech it abhors at an appropriate time, place and manner. But that right does not include the ability to disrupt and intimidate others into silence.

Universities have a special responsibility to ensure that speech is “robust and uninhibited” on campus. As such, they have a constitutional duty to protect speakers from those who would drown them out. Hats off to UCI for taking this duty seriously.

A federal judge ruled Monday that nationally syndicated opinion columns written by a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington are not protected by the First Amendment because he referred to them on a promotion application.

ADF attorneys argue that the university refused to promote Dr. Mike Adams to full professor because of his religious beliefs and political viewpoints, as espoused through his columns.  They are considering their options for appealing the decision.

“Christian professors should not be discriminated against because of their beliefs.  No university should refuse promotion to an accomplished professor simply because it disagrees with his religious and political views,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jordan Lorence.  “We disagree with the court’s assessment that Dr. Adams’ speech is somehow not protected by the Constitution.  Opinion columns are classic examples of free speech protected by the First Amendment, and mentioning them on a promotion application does not change this fact.”

Adams frequently received accolades from his colleagues after the university hired him as an assistant professor in 1993 and promoted him to associate professor in 1998 when he was an atheist.  However, intrusive investigations, baseless accusations, and the denial of promotion to full professor followed his conversion to Christianity in 2000, even though his scholarly output surpassed that of almost all of his colleagues. Keep reading… »