Free Speech on College Campuses

This week's blog topic was one that really interested me personally - the topic of free speech on a college campus. In my undergraduate years, I took a class called First Amendment and Society to fulfill requirements for my journalism degree, and we spoke about free speech at length. As someone who is extremely interested in the law and is even considering possibly enrolling in law school one day, anything dealing with the Constitution is interesting to me, especially if we are looking at it through the lens of a college campus.

I found the FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) website to be extremely helpful in providing a framework for the discussion of free speech. As our assignment was to find the most recent free speech case on a college campus and comment on it, I will be writing about a case at San Jose State University. You can find the full text of the article here on FIRE's website: http://www.thefire.org/article/11548.html

In summary, the housing department at SJSU revised several restrictive policies that basically prohibited free speech on campus. Let's compare the old policy to the new...

The Old: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a significantly uncomfortable, threatening, or harassing environment for any UHS resident or guest will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution. The conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective.

The New: Any form of activity, whether covert or overt, that creates a threatening or harassing environment for any UHS resident, guest, or staff member will be handled judicially and may be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, revocation of the Housing License Agreement, and criminal prosecution.

Rather than there being plenty of new key words in the new policy, it is important to note instead the words that have been removed - the word "uncomfortable" and the entire last sentence of the old policy, which stated "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass. The conduct is evaluated from the complainant's perspective." By removing that last sentence, SJSU is complying much more with grounds of free speech. By saying that "the conduct does not have to be intended to harass," that is basically implying that I could get kicked out of my residence hall if anything I said to anyone was taken the wrong way. If I said "the sky is blue" and someone got offended slightly by it, I could be removed from my residence hall and rendered homeless, which doesn't seem to be the least bit rational. Also, by evaluating the situation from "the complainant's perspective," it takes away the judiciality of the case and puts it into the hands of an emotional, offended, college-aged student who basically wields the power to kick a student out of the residence hall. It seems a bit overdone and not nearly fair enough.

Free speech is such an important right that we as American citizens all have. I am happy to see that organizations such as FIRE even exist to make sure that we retain that right to free speech, especially on a college campus. SJSU's example is one step in the right direction for higher education to continually move in the direction of free speech for all - and, because they are setting the precedent, we will hopefully see advances in the movement for years to come.