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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Students Fight Free Speech Zones |
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by Oread Daily
(No verified email address) |
15 May 2002
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ZONED OUT IN WEST VIRGINIA
At many Universities around the country attempts are being made to limit the right of free speech to a few selected areas of campuses. West Virginia University (WVU) students have been engaged in a fight against just such a policy at their school. Monday they staged a mock funeral in which they laid the First Amendment to rest in a newspaper-wrapped coffin to express their displeasure. "Like an endangered species, the habitat of free speech is shrinking," senior Helena Triplett said during her eulogy. "It is not until we try to move that we realize we cannot." Friends gathered at a designated free speech zone in front of the Evansdale Library to mourn for the amendment while blasting the Faculty Senate's attempts to revamp the campus' free speech policy. The policy restricts gatherings to 30 people in designated areas, and sets time constraints. Pallbearers, draped in black, arrived with a papier-mache casket, marked with a quote from "Satanic Verses" author Salmon Rushdie: "What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." One of the consortium's leaders, Mike Bomford, said activists deliberately organized the funeral to coincide with a Faculty Senate meeting at a building, next to the library, where administrators voting on a "comprimise" policy which agreed to increase the number of zones while also imposing additional restrictions on student activity. A policy already rejected by the students.
As aptly put by WVU Free Speech Consortium member Sarah Seldomridge at an earlier demonstration. "The policy effectively creates a 'censorship zone' out of the rest of our campus."
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in Philadelphia, sent a letter to WVU President David C. Hardesty Jr., urging his administration to revoke the policy. "These absurdly named 'free-speech zones' have no place at the free institutions of a free society," said Alan Charles Kors, FIRE's president. "A public university does not have the authority to repeal the Bill of Rights."
Although no one has claimed credit for it, the initial policy created just two small zones for some 22,000 students. It first appeared in a WVU student handbook in 1995. Enforcement began in 2000, when students picketed companies recruiting on campus. The policy also uses language that has traditionally been struck down by the courts and contains vague provisions such as a ban on using sticks or "hard objects" to hold up signs. "They can't use sticks or hard objects to hold up signs, so essentially they can't have signs," John W. Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute said. "And what's a hard object? My arm could be a hard object."
Meanwhile at WVU Bomford lay the First Amendment to rest in the casket as a few Faculty Senate members walked past the scene with dumbfounded looks, "We will remember the First Amendment even if the Faculty Senate and the university administration bury her in bureaucracy and strangle her with red tape. May she rest in peace until she rises again at West Virginia University."
Sources: Dominion Post (Morgantown, WV), The Athenaeum (WVU), Washington Times, WVU Free Speech Consortium
The Oread Daily provides daily (Monday-Friday) progressive, left, anti-racist, anarchist, commie, activist, environmental, Marxist, revolutionary, etc. news and information from around the US and around the world. The Oread Daily was a mimeographed sheet that came out first in the summer of 1970 in Lawrence, Kansas. It was irreverent, radical, spicy, revolutionary et. al. Now, three decades later it returns. To view the entire Oread Daily, please visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/OreadDaily |
