Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
A group of conservative students at Clovis Community College in California wanted to hang anti-Communist posters on campus to attract other students to their new chapter of Young Americans for Freedom.
Alejandro Flores, Daniel Flores, and Juliette Colunga, founders of the new chapter, sought and obtained the college’s permission. But when administrators received a complaint about the posters, the college’s president, Lori Bennett, ordered the students to take them down.
Why, if the college protects the free speech of its students, would it suppress a message simply because other students opposed it? As it turns out, the administrators also opposed the message.
The students’ legal counsel, The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), said that Bennett made up a reason to justify the blatant viewpoint discrimination, which is exactly what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is supposed to prevent.
“If you need a reason, you can let them know that [we] agreed they aren’t club announcements,” Bennett told the staff.
Administrators later used that pretextual justification to stop the students from hanging a new set of five pro-life flyers — which the students submitted for approval in December — on the bulletin boards inside heavily trafficked campus buildings. Instead, administrators banished the flyers to a rotting “free speech kiosk” in a desolate part of campus.
The students filed a lawsuit in August. They alleged that the college “maintained a vague and overbroad policy that prohibited students from posting flyers that contained inappropriate or offensive language, using it to ban the students’ flyers.”
In emails FIRE obtained through a request for public records, an administrator wrote that he’d “gladly” take down the flyers and that it was a “mistake” to allow them in the first place. He wrote that they should have been rejected for containing inappropriate or offensive language or themes.
A judge disagreed and blocked the college from enforcing the speech codes.
Judge Jennifer L. Thurston got to the hypocritical heart of the matter. The policy “undermines the school’s own interest in fostering a diversity of viewpoints on campus, thus frustrating, rather than promoting, the College’s basic educational mission.”
Judge Thurston’s ruling exposes the intent of leftist administrators and faculty in colleges and universities across the country. They seek conformity of opinion and superficial diversity of skin color, not diversity of viewpoints.
“The court told Clovis what we’ve been telling them all along: You cant censor students just because you don’t like their message,” FIRE attorney Jeff Zeman said. “The fight isn’t over. We’ve defeated this unconstitutional policy, but we won’t stop until Clovis treats all student speech equally.”
Photo credit: FIRE
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Can there be a more blatant admission that the education system is controlled by the leftists? The administrators of this college did not agree with the message, so removed it. The students should’ve taken the lawsuit one step further and gone for monetary damages against the college and the individual staff members who denied them their 1st amendment right.
When we start making it felt in their wallets, then we will get their attention and change follows. That is how they play the game, so can we.
Just sayin’.
Without using cuss words in the flyer (or willfully denigrating another religion, race or ethnic group), exactly what type of publicity/clubs are acceptable on campus these days? Seems like college kids in late ’60s early ’70s had much more leeway with “freedom of expression.”