Settlement ends restrictive speech codes at California community college district
Conservative students recently won free speech protections and $330,000 in damages and fees.
The victory on Friday in federal court ends a battle that began two years ago when Young Americans for Freedom at Clovis Community College wanted to put up “anti-communist flyers” and “pro-life flyers.”
The Friday legal order “permanently prohibits State Center Community College District — of which Clovis and three other community colleges are a part — from banning ‘inappropriate or offensive’ speech or enforcing any viewpoint-discriminatory, overbroad, or vague policy to censor speech by a student group,” according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Some of the posters (below) were critical of socialism and were put up in November 2021, as part of YAF’s “Freedom Week” programming, as previously reported by The College Fix.
The community college also prohibited the group from posting pro-life flyers on December 1 of that year, when the Supreme Court heard the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case surrounding Mississippi’s ban on some abortions.
Instead, the group was allowed to post on the “free speech kiosk,” “a small box covered in rotting wood planks” on “the edge of a walkway students virtually never use because it does not lead to any building entrances or parking lots,” according to the original complaint.
The order also requires the district to adopt a new poster policy to “protect the First Amendment rights of all student groups across the district.”
District administrators must also take an annual First Amendment training as part of the settlement.
FIRE represented the three student plaintiffs Alejandro Flores, Juliette Colunga, and Daniel Flores (pictured).
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that the posting policy violated the students’ rights.
“We won. We showed the school they were wrong,” Alejandro Flores stated in a news release from the free speech group. “FIRE had our back at every step throughout the process. If you think your speech is being stifled, don’t stay quiet, because when you stay quiet, nothing changes.”
The three students and the campus YAF chapter will each receive $20,000, while the court awarded another $250,000 in attorneys’ fees.
The settlement protects the free speech rights of 50,000 students, according to FIRE.
“From now on, student groups won’t have to second guess or jump through hoops just to hang a flyer on the bulletin board,” attorney Daniel Ortner stated. “And rather than wielding unrestrained power to decide whose views are ‘appropriate’ or ‘offensive,’ administrators will defer to the First Amendment.”
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IMAGES: Young America’s Foundation; Alvarez Photography Studio via Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
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