Escaping university free speech zones

Georgia legislators last week passed a ban on so-called free speech zones on public college campuses. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is expected to sign the bill, which would take effect July 1. Despite the name, free speech zones have often been used to limit expression more than protect it.

House Bill 1, titled the Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act (“FORUM Act”), allows speech or other expressive activity on any outdoor areas of college campuses that are generally open to students. It covers students, faculty, and guest speakers, though schools can enact narrow time, place, and manner restrictions to avoid campus disruptions.

For former Georgia Gwinnett College student Chike Uzuegbunam, the bill is a late but welcome vindication of his rights. In 2016, police at the public college northeast of Atlanta stopped Uzuegbunam from distributing Christian literature and sharing his faith in a designated free speech zone. It was one of two spots that together made up only 0.00015 percent of the total area of the campus.

School policy at that time prohibited using the zones to say anything that “disturbs the peace and/or comfort of person(s).” The school ultimately revised its policy and argued the court should dismiss Uzuegbunam’s lawsuit as moot. But in an 8-1 ruling in March 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed, vindicating Uzuegbunam’s free speech rights and his right to nominal damages.

Under Georgia’s new law, university officials can only restrict expressive activity if it is violent, unlawful, or would prevent other students from attending, observing, or participating in expressive activity. The latter provision takes aim at the kind of disruption evidenced in March at Yale University Law School, where students shouted down a Federalist Society guest speaker.

And while HB 1 prohibits student-on-student harassment, it draws the line on so-called microaggressions. It is not enough that a student feels offended. To qualify as harassment, speech must be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that a student is effectively denied equal access to educational opportunities or benefits.”

Many, though not all, Democratic legislators voted against the bill. “When we start to look at the motives, it comes from a myth that conservatives are being discriminated against on college campuses, which we heard over and over again at the committee hearing,” state Rep. David Dreyer told WGCL-TV in response to earlier debates in the state’s House of Representatives.

But Republicans say the law protects any group’s speech and also protects universities. “Part of the intent is to reduce and hopefully eliminate the number of lawsuits filed against our universities,” Republican Rep. Josh Bonner told the news station.

Free speech zones emerged during the turbulent campus unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when universities attempted to clamp down on disruptive anti-war demonstrations. But in recent years, conservative political and evangelical religious groups have borne the brunt of university officials limiting free speech to tiny zones. Often, officials are ostensibly more concerned about disruptive pushback from other students than they are about the original speaker.

But free speech zones appear to be on their way out. A recent report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education indicates that only about 5 percent of the 481 colleges it tracks had such zones last year, down from more than 16 percent in 2013. Indiana recently joined Virginia, Missouri, Arizona, Kentucky, Utah, and Colorado in enacting a similar ban on free speech zones.