From: Michael Bomford (m_bomford@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Apr 06 2002 - 18:10:28 EST
Free Speech Zones have taken a huge amount of our organizing energy at
West Virginia University. At our campus, we think the concept originated
sometime during the last 10 or 15 years, as a way to keep travelling
preachers and their ilk confined to a certain portion of campus. If the
zones are older than that they've only been enforced in the past 10 years.
We found out about free speech zones when we tried to hand out literature
about sweatshops to students entering a Disney recruitment seminar a year
and a half ago. The police turned up and told us we had to go because we
weren't in the zone.
We've been fighting since then. Have a look at the timeline at
www.wvejc.org/speech/ for related events and media. You might be
particularly interested in an article about free speech zones from the
Chronicle of Higher Education. It is one of the related media sites
accessible from our timeline.
There are a number court decisions related to speech zones. We reference
several of them in a piece we wrote for our student paper last week,
outlining the problems with the free speech zone policy at WVU. You can
read the article at
http://www.da.wvu.edu/archives/020404/news/020404,04,04.html but I must
warn you that the formatting of the online version is terrible.
The Foundation for Intellectual Rights in Education (FIRE) has recently
started to address the constitutionality of free speech zones at college
campuses. Look at their site at www.thefire.org.
I would love to see a nation-wide rebellion against free speech zones at
college campuses. In my view they infantalize students, compromise First
Amendment rights, and attack the very essence of democracy.
Michael Bomford
Students for Economic Justice
West Virginia University
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Oct 28 2002 - 02:52:32 EST