A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against a California college’s speech code that it had used to justify censoring anti-communist posters generated by conservative students.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) won the court order in its lawsuit against the school, Clovis Community College in Fresno, on behalf of three students from a campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) who wanted to criticize authoritarianism.
In November 2021, YAF club members Alejandro Flores, Daniel Flores, and Juliette Colunga obtained permission from campus administrators to hang three posters on bulletin boards inside the academic buildings of their school. The posters promoted freedom and listed the death tolls of communist regimes, associating communism with the “blind arrogance of the left.”
Clovis Community College’s speech code required preapproval from the campus administration prior to putting up posters. In addition, the policy forbade students from displaying material containing language or themes deemed “inappropriate” or “offensive” at the taxpayer-funded school.
Public colleges such as Clovis must honor constitutional free speech protections. It’s unconstitutional to treat students differently based on their points of view.
The school relocated the posters to a so-called free speech kiosk in a remote part of the campus, claiming the posters didn’t advertise a specific club event, even though no policy required such a thing. The school also withheld permission for the club members to display pro-life posters, according to the legal complaint.
“We wanted to criticize authoritarian governments, but we had no idea that our own college would try to stop us,” YAF–Clovis founder Alejandro Flores said in a statement provided by FIRE. “I’m glad we fought back, because all students should be able to speak out at college.”
The school’s vague and overly broad policy violates the free speech protections of the First Amendment to the Constitution, Judge Jennifer Thurston of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California ruled on Oct. 14.
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,” she wrote.
Thurston was appointed by President Joe Biden. The case is Flores v. Bennett, court file 1:22-cv-01003.
According to FIRE, the court ruling makes it clear that schools can’t silence students.
“The court told Clovis what we’ve been telling them all along: You can’t 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.”
A public records request showed that when the posters were put up, a campus administrator said that he would “gladly” remove them after complaints were received and that approving them in the first place may have been a “mistake,” according to FIRE.
Clovis President Lori Bennett personally directed the removal of the posters and invented a new rule requiring that they double as club announcements, FIRE said in a statement.
“If you need a reason, you can let them know that [we] agreed they aren’t club announcements,” Bennett told Clovis staffers.
FIRE added that “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.”
Clovis Community College didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
