A student says school officials stopped him from handing out copies of the Constitution. Now he’s suing.
A student says school officials stopped him from handing out copies of the Constitution. Now he’s suing. - Kevin Shaw was handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution to students at Pierce College in Los Angeles when he was stopped by a school official and told that he was only allowed to do so in the “free-speech zone” on campus and would need a permit, the philosophy and political science student says.
“These are our rights,” Shaw said this week, after filing a lawsuit in federal court against the college and the Los Angeles Community College District, which requires all campuses to have such zones. “Why should the school be able to set which groups are allowed to speak, and who is allowed their First Amendment rights?” The Washington Post
College officials did not respond to requests for comment. Yusef Robb, a consultant to the district, responded with a statement: “The Los Angeles Community College District firmly stands behind every student’s right to free expression.” He said it has no further comment at this time.
Supporters say designating spaces for protest helps keep campuses safer and prevents demonstrations from excessively disrupting students’ educations.
Shaw’s case launches a national effort by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to combat “free-speech zones” on campuses, which the group has long criticized as unconstitutional.
“At the very moment when colleges and universities should be encouraging open debate and the active exchange of ideas, Pierce College instead sends the message to its students that free speech is suspect and should be ever more tightly controlled,” Arthur Willner, an attorney working with FIRE on the case, said in a statement. “This does a disservice to the student body, as well as being contrary to long-established law.”
Marieke Beck-Coon, director of litigation at FIRE, said that “a student on a public campus engaging in core protected public speech, peacefully speaking with fellow students … should not have to ask for, essentially, government permission” to do so. The case challenges the rule that all speech be quarantined to one tiny area of campus, she said — the zone is 616 square feet of the school’s 426 acres — as well as the requirement that permission must be granted before using the zone and the district’s rule that all of its schools designate a zone.
Free speech has been a provocative issue at colleges across the country, with debates about when language crosses the line into hate speech, whether controversial speakers should be invited to campus, whether students should be warned before hearing something troubling or potentially traumatizing, and when protests become dangerous, among other issues.
“Free-speech zones” are relatively common on college campuses. By FIRE’s estimation, 1 in 10 schools have one, affecting about a million students.
Shaw said he was handing out copies of the Constitution after the divisive presidential election and that there had just been a large anti-Trump protest on campus. “Students had been yelling on both sides, left and right. I wanted to represent a moderate middle, people on the left and the right. We don’t have to hate each other.”
The reaction from other students, he said, was “awesome. I had a lot of really great conversations with people.”
He doesn’t think of himself as either liberal or conservative, had objections to both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson. He was hoping some of the students might join the chapter of Young Americans for Liberty at Pierce, which he heads. The national group has an ongoing free speech campaign.
Shaw said when the school official told him to stop his handouts, he tried to politely ask about his First Amendment rights, then packed up and left when he was told he would be asked to leave campus if he did not comply.
He tried to talk with administrators about it, but they declined, Shaw said, and he had trouble getting a copy of the school policy until he refused to leave an office until he got one. “About 150,000 students are affected by these policies,” he said. He asked someone at Young Americans for Liberty about what he could do, and they suggested FIRE might be able to help, he said.
“I wanted to make sure I was doing the right thing; I sat down and thought, ‘Is this the moral thing to do, the correct thing to do?'” he said. “This fight is about a student’s right to engage in free thinking and debate while attending college in America.”
