A Community College of Spokane student and member of the campus club, Spokane Falls Christian Fellowship, is suing the college for forbidding her club from holding an educational event about their pro-life views and for the policies underlying the college’s actions. While it’s always tough to know what really happened from reading an initial legal complaint, here it’s clear that any number of problems—from the letter of the policies to their enforcement—occurred at CC Spokane.
The student and her club were told that they could not hold their event because their literature, displays and other content of their speech constituted everything from discrimination and harassment to hate speech. You can see both the complaint and the flyers/displays the students intended to show in the attached pdf. They were further told that one reason they couldn’t hold their event was that it contained exclusively pro-life views; school officials apparently believed that events needed to represent at least two sides to an issue to be permissible, despite approving several other events that advocated for only one side of an issue.
The situation here is obviously staggering, but unfortunately more emblematic of fairly common problems than an exceptional case.
CC Spokane’s policies on harassment and hate/bias incidents are both vague and restrict far more than genuine harassment and threats. For example, the CCS Administrative Procedure § 2.30.01, Section 1.1 categorizes prohibited harassment as “verbal and written comments, slurs, jokes, innuendos, cartoons, pranks and any and all other physical or nonphysical conduct or activity that can be construed as derogatory, intimidating, hostile or offensive.” Unfortunately, very similar policies exist on many campuses and block all sorts of speech that has a place in the campus dialogue.
CC Spokane’s red tape and prior review of publications and flyers are restrictive and cut down on the free exchange of ideas on campus. The Student Code of Conduct and General Policies require that campus speakers have prior approval from a college student activities office, that “the appropriate student activities office will be notified at least thirty days prior to the appearance of an invited speaker,” and only allow the distribution of materials (leaflets, newspapers, etc) with “prior approval by the appropriate student center administrator.” Requiring prior approval for speakers and materials allows not only review of their comment, but apparently in this case disapproval based on their content (a.k.a. classic censorship) strikes against the very heart of a marketplace of ideas on campus. Unfortunately, though the policies on campuses differ in the time limits and what administrator gives approval, far too many campuses restrict student speech with red tape and prior review of written material.
Perhaps the only policy of CCS that is exceptional is the apparent policy requiring multiple sides of a debate to be heard. While from what we can find, this policy is only partially written down (the policy on outside speakers states that “the appropriate student activities office may require a question and answer period or arrange to have views other than those of the invited speakers represented at this meeting”), it is both an odd policy and highly problematic for the free exchange of ideas on campus. Whether administrators enforced this policy against the Spokane Falls Christian Fellowship because of hostility to their perspective or because they mistakenly believed you can only have debate if you force the inclusion of multiple perspectives, you can only really have a robust debate and forum for student expression when you allow them to express themselves. This policy directly regulates what speech can happen—by forcing a different perspective to be expressed.
Regardless of the outcome of this specific case, other institutions should learn from this complaint and get rid of similar policies that restrict speech and the marketplace of ideas on campus.
SheeranComplaint.pdf