If you attend Oklahoma State University, you are, I hope, now free to speak.
OSU will shut down a “bias response team” instituted to harass speech on campus. We can thank a group called Speech First, which sued the school.
“We are excited to announce that OSU will be eliminating their insidious bias reporting system that told students to anonymously report on one another for ‘bias’ and that they will have to rewrite their harassment policy to include important speech protections so that students can no longer be punished for merely expressing their views,” says Cherise Trump, executive director of
“We have also secured a change to their computer policy so that it no longer targets the protected political speech
The settlement also requires the school to pay Speech First $18,000 for legal expenses.
OSU had tried to get the lawsuit dismissed because Speech First protected the names of its plaintiffs,
Speech First’s reason for using pseudonyms is pretty commonsensical: to protect plaintiffs from retaliation. That a university with a policy of punishing students for renegade speech might also punish them for participating in a lawsuit to end this policy doesn’t seem like a farfetched concern.
The resolution of the case hardly means that the fight for freedom of speech on campus is over. But it may help other universities realize that, as Cherise Trump puts it, “there is a high cost to violating students’ constitutional rights.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder and Firefly
—
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
4 replies on “College Censors Squelched”
In their efforts to move the Overton Window, the political left often goes so far as to violate the US Constitution.
Mind you that, while the left has been engaged in such violation, they are not uniquely guilty of seeking such violation. In response to the upsurge both of anti-Zionism and of anti-Semitism (which are not conterminous) at colleges and universities, some appalling demands have come from a coälition that includes not only some leftists but many conservatives and right-wing populists.
Thank you for your comment making this point. Rights are rights. That is what constitutions are for. We have to recognize that regardless of which “side” is hurt or helped. In the end, freedom protects us all better than forced silence ever can.
A high cost for violating constitutional rights would add another zero or two to the damages to be paid.
Justifiably punitive.
As an OSU alum, I am stunned. Just goes to show that a state run institution can be triggered by unrestricted free speech. Of course this is an institution whose president demanded, cajoled and otherwise promoted the deadly shot for it’s students to participate in activities.