Libertarian Students Sue College for Making Them Get Permission to Share Views
“claim that student handbook policies constitute a prior restraint on student speech”
These students reached out to FIRE for help. Very smart.
The College Fix reports:
Libertarian students sue public college for making them get permission to share views
Asking students to write on a beach ball and talk about marijuana got Mike Brown in trouble with his public college.
Requiring students to get advance permission before sharing their opinions got Jones County Junior College in trouble with a civil liberties group.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the Mississippi college on behalf of Brown and his Young Americans for Liberty chapter.
They claim that student handbook policies constitute a prior restraint on student speech and fail to provide constitutionally required “narrow, objective, and definite standards,” as articulated by the Supreme Court.
Brown and non-student staffers for the national YAL organization had two run-ins with administrators and campus police during the spring semester while promoting the new campus chapter.
The non-student staffers were also threatened with arrest if they didn’t leave, and Brown was “taken to the chief of police’s office to be admonished” for speaking on campus “without the administration’s prior approval,” the suit alleges.
FIRE warned the taxpayer-funded institution in a May 16 letter that the policies enforced against Brown and the chapter were unconstitutional, and offered to help the college reform its policies.
It escalated the matter to litigation after receiving no response, FIRE said in a press release Wednesday.
“Some people get in trouble for smoking weed, but at Jones College, I got in trouble just for trying to talk about it,” Brown said in the press release, referring to the two-year college by its preferred name. (The better known Jones College was a four-year Florida school that shuttered two years ago.)
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