UGA lifts campus restrictions on student speech
In the wake of a lawsuit filed against it, a prominent university in the South has relented and opened up its campus to allow students to speak freely without restrictions.
Previously, the University of Georgia (UGA) had a rigid "speech zone" policy that unconstitutionally restricted the free-speech rights of students, limiting student discourse to two small areas comprising less than one-percent of the campus. If students wished to speak outside of those zones, they were required to request a permit 48 hours in advance.
Kerri Kupec is legal communications director for Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the Young Americans for Liberty group that had filed suit against the school. "When universities do something like that, they just simply can't function as this vital marketplace of ideas," she notes.
Also under the policy, students wishing to speak inside the speech zones had to coordinate their time with UGA officials. As ADF points out, in both cases whether students wanted to speak inside or outside the zones university officials had the final say on which groups could and could not speak.
Two years ago YAL was prevented from setting up their display depicting the growing national debt because it was outside the speech zone. As Kupec explains, that restriction is now gone.
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