Texas law puts free speech to bed on college campuses

Juke Matthews, now a senior at the University of Texas at Dallas, says he was a nervous and lonely freshman when he joined his first college community, the Fellowship of Christian University Students (FOCUS). A new state law threatens student groups’ ability to hold late-night meetings, something Matthews, now a committee chairman for the group, says is a mainstay of the ministry’s work.

On Wednesday, FOCUS and four other student groups, along with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sued the University of Texas System over new rules that they say turn the campus into a speech-free zone for 10 hours every night. While the rules aim to protect campuses from protesters, student groups like FOCUS say that the law instead stifles their free speech.

Last month, Texas lawmakers amended a 2019 law that broadly protected speech and expressive activity. As a state agency, the university was required to adopt rules and regulations to comply. The new law, authored by state Sen. Brandon Creighton, a Republican, instead seeks to limit opportunities for protests on campuses. It went into effect last week.

“This is how we protect student safety, defend our institutions, and safeguard freedom for generations to come,” Creighton said when the law passed this summer.

Last year, a number of high-profile protests against the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza occurred across Texas. At UT-Austin, police arrested more than 100 people at one demonstration.

Under the law, the UT System created blackout hours for expressive activity from 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. every day and banned groups from inviting outside speakers for two weeks at the end of each semester. The law defines expressive activity as “any speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment.”

FIRE argues in its 59-page lawsuit that the UT System is disciplining students for nighttime activities such as chatting with friends, wearing a shirt with a political message, holding prayer meetings, or working at student newspapers.

FIRE adds that the law casts a “long censorial shadow” that violates constitutional rights, and it contends that this definition can be effectively used to prohibit any type of speech campus-wide for students, staff, and faculty alike.

“The First Amendment does not go to bed when the sun goes down. Nor does it take days off,” the lawsuit states. “Instead, the First Amendment protects free speech at public universities and colleges 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

In the suit, five student groups express concern that the law’s limitations hurt their ability to operate.

Matthews said that FOCUS tries to offer students meeting times that fit their schedules. Meetings regularly run past 10 p.m. as students linger to chat and pray with each other, he said. The organization also sets up small groups, held nearly anytime during the week, often later in the evening. Individual leaders pick times that work best for their groups.

“I want the ministry to be something that can be very inviting and meet people where they are at all the time,” Matthews said. “With something like this bill that blocks the hours that you can do that, I feel like it forces us to miss out on a lot of people that we could invite into community and introduce to Jesus.”

He added that the new law also restricts FOCUS’s ability to invite guest speakers at the end of each term. The group typically invites guest pastors to speak at ministry-wide meetings while students are focused on studying for finals.

UT-Dallas has multiple academic terms, meaning the ban applies to over 90 days on the school calendar, according to the suit.

Two student music groups, a political advocacy organization, and an independent student newspaper also allege that the law prohibits their activities. Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, editor-in-chief of The Retrograde, an independent student newspaper at UT-Dallas, said that student journalists could be punished for covering breaking news if it happens at night.

“Under these new rules, we’re at risk of being shut down simply for posting breaking news as it happens,” Olivares Gutierrez said in a news release.

The new rule’s restrictions are “breathtakingly broad,” said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at FIRE. He doesn’t see any arguments that Texas could make in court that would pass constitutional muster. Other universities have tried to implement narrower laws but have “run right smack dab into the First Amendment,” he said.

In May, a federal judge paused part of Indiana University’s expressive activity policy after the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana sued. The judge called the policy’s ban on expressive activity between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. unconstitutionally overbroad.

Zack Smith, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, acknowledged that Texas’ law tries to address problems with on-campus protests. But the new law could give universities leeway to engage in viewpoint discrimination by allowing them to regulate some extent of speech, he said.

“Texas is trying to deal with a very real, very serious problem,” Smith said. “They just may need to go back and do a little more narrowly tailoring in this area.”