Liberty on campus in 2008: FIRE's year in review

We read:

"FIRE won many victories for freedom of speech, religious liberty, freedom of association, and freedom of conscience throughout 2008, including key legal victories for student rights on campus. These successes included:

* Reversing the finding of racial harassment against a student-employee at Indiana University -Purdue University Indianapolis, whose "offense" consisted of reading a book in an employee break room about the 1924 defeat of the Ku Klux Klan in a street fight with Notre Dame students. The case has been made into a documentary.

* Reversing the expulsion of a student at Valdosta State University who had peacefully protested against new parking garages via Facebook.com, and persuading Valdosta State to eliminate its tiny, restrictive free speech zone. This case is the subject of a short film.

* Convincing the University of Delaware to revise its formerly unconstitutional distribution policy and to keep mandatory ideological reeducation out of its dormitories.

* Intervening to protect funding for student groups at Montclair State University and Central Washington University, where student governments threatened to de-fund the groups because of their constitutionally protected expression.

* Persuading Temple College in Texas to reverse its censorship of a professor for posting a quotation from Nietszche ("God is dead") on his office door.

* Fighting attempts by the Department of Social Work at Binghamton University (formerly SUNY-Binghamton) to expel a student for posting flyers criticizing a recent hiring decision by the department. FIRE succeeded in ending the farcical disciplinary hearing against student Andr‚ Massena, but he now faces reported retaliation from the department that would fail him out of school.

Free speech on campus also gained a major legal victory when the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled in DeJohn v. Temple University that Temple University's former speech code was unconstitutional. FIRE, which wrote an amicus brief in the case, now has alerted hundreds of schools that they maintain similar speech codes at their legal peril. Between this decision and the legal victory against the speech codes of the California State University System last year, practically no college administrator can claim ignorance of the law.

In addition, under legal pressure, Shippensburg University agreed for the second time to dismantle an unconstitutional speech code that was originally eliminated four years ago in a suit brought by FIRE Legal Network attorneys.

Source

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