Just realized my campus had a 'speech zone' policy I never noticed

Used to think free speech was fine until I tried to hand out flyers for a film club near the student union and got told I had to be in a designated 10x10 spot behind the library. Three weeks later the Dean admitted they only created the zone after a conservative speaker got 500 signatures to come in 2022. Anyone else find out their school had hidden rules like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

calebw5026d agoMost Upvoted

500 signatures back in 2022? That number feels low for getting an entire policy rewritten. Had a similar thing happen at my school. The zone they gave us had no shade and barely fit 30 people. The real kicker was finding out the policy was written by a single VP of Student Affairs with no input from anyone else. They just copied the language from a conservative legal group's template. So the rule wasn't even original to the school. Just a sloppy copy-paste job that punished everyone equally.

abbyc3326d ago

The 500 was just students from our group, we actually got around 800 total with signatures from faculty and staff too. Still not huge but it was enough to make admin look bad when the local paper picked up the story.