Conservative College Student's Charges Cleared After Rights Advocates Intervene
by Jim Brown
May 11, 2004
(AgapePress) - California Polytechnic University has settled a First Amendment lawsuit regarding its decision to punish a conservative student for posting a flyer on a bulletin board in the school's multicultural center.Last year, Cal Poly student Steve Hinkle was found guilty of disrupting a campus event for putting up the flier advertising a speech by African-American social critic Mason Weaver. However a lawsuit filed by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) on Hinkle's behalf has prompted Cal Poly to clear his disciplinary record and allow him to post flyers.
Hinkle had been told by students in the multicultural center that the flyer advertising the conservative black author was racially offensive. Then Cal Poly officials had subsequently charged the student with disrupting a meeting, subjected him to a seven-hour judicial hearing, and forced him to write letters of apology to those who claimed the fliers were racially offensive.
Curt Levey of CIR notes that Hinkle's case is rife with double standards and contradictions. He contends that, had a minority student been posting a flyer in an all-white fraternity, the school would no doubt have considered that act a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.
And Levey says there is even greater irony in the fact that "you've just had in the last year, universities in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases arguing that diversity of viewpoints is so vital to an education that it should trump the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee. And yet, here you have a university punishing a student for exactly the sort of give-and-take on racial issues that racial diversity is supposed to promote. So there's a lot of hypocrisy."
However, after the individual rights advocacy groups intervened on Hinkle's behalf, Cal Poly officials relented. According to the terms of the settlement, the university has agreed to clear Hinkle's disciplinary record and will make no further attempt to prevent him from posting his flyers.
Levey says the case sets an important precedent. "The work we've done in the past with First Amendment lawsuits has already made universities cautious about punishing speech," he notes, "but they've been trying a new tack -- characterizing the speech as conduct, which is what they did here."
The CIR spokesman explains: "They said, 'We're not punishing you for your speech; we're punishing you for disrupting a meeting.' And I think this case got enough publicity that I think universities are now forewarned that they are not going to be able to get away with this."
FIRE spokesman Greg Lukianoff says the Cal Poly settlement "brings an end to a bizarre and outrageous attempt to suppress free speech."
