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Zoning for free speech
Student activists at the University of Central Florida were shut down by campus police last spring, in a classic scene of confusion about where First Amendment rights end and where reasonable, legal restrictions on time, place, and manner begin:
One minute, members of Students for a Democratic Society were sitting in a breezeway, holding signs asking other students to discuss a possible war in Iran.The next, the University of Central Florida police were accusing the campus activists of trespassing and were threatening them with arrest if they didn't move to a designated "free-assembly area."
That event in April launched an ongoing dispute over free speech at UCF that echoes similar struggles between university administrators and students across the country.
Officials at the campus east of Orlando say they're just trying to prevent protesters from blocking entrances or disturbing classes and other university functions.
"We're trying to protect everyone's interest here, not only those who want to demonstrate or protest," UCF spokesman Tom Evelyn said.
Students contend that the real motive is to shut them up.
"They have no respect for the First Amendment, and they want to control what we say," said Patrick DeCarlo, 21, a UCF creative-writing major, SDS member and student senator.
UCF shouldn't and can't allow protesters to stage demonstrations whenever and wherever they see fit. The dispute at UCF centers on whether SDS protesters were exercising their constitutional rights or "interfering with business when they held signs in a breezeway outside the John T. Washington Center, which contains a bookstore, credit union and other services." But it doesn't sound like SDS was interfering with anything at all--and it does sound as though UCF's policy on free assembly areas amounts to license to abuse the right to place reasonable restrictions on the time, place, and manner on student expression.
The courts have determined that public university campuses violate students' First Amendment rights when they confine protesters to free speech zones, or, in this case, "designated 'free speech areas.'" UCF has four such areas (increased from one several years ago)--and as such it has a problem. As the logic goes, to designate certain areas of campus as "assembly" areas is to announce that there is no free speech on the rest of campus. Public universities can't legally do that.
UCF has tried to pretend that's not what it's doing, but the argument is pretty flimsy:
Though students call them "free-speech zones," university officials designate them as "free-assembly areas.""We attempt to clarify with students that they have free speech everywhere," Ehasz said.
Jay Jurie, faculty adviser to UCF's SDS chapter and an associate professor of public administration, said officials are playing semantic games.
"The university is trying to carve out an artificial distinction between speech and assembly," said Jurie, who was active with the University of Colorado chapter of the original SDS in 1969. "It's absurd and preposterous."
FIRE has taken up the cause of UCF's SDS chapter, and the university is responding by reviewing its policies.
Posted by acta online on December 19, 2006 at December 19, 2006 11:37 PM
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