Free speech may have become a vanishingly rare thing on university campuses, but it turns out that at least one variety of free speech is still protected: T-shirt marijuana advocacy.
On June 13, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that Iowa State University officials had infringed the rights of a student group by preventing them from using university logos on T-shirts promoting marijuana legalization.
Iowa State University had treated the campus chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws like any of the other 800 some student groups at the school. But then, in 2012, the head of the club went and praised the school’s administration to the Des Moines Register, which reported “his group has gotten nothing but support from the university.” As proof of the school’s groovy attitude, the Register offered the example of the club’s T-shirts, which featured the university’s mascot, Cy the Cardinal, the NORML acronym, and a cannabis leaf.
The university’s Trademark Office, keepers of how school logos and mascot images can be used, had indeed given its stamp of approval to the T-shirt design—a rubber-stamp sort that had never been meant as any kind of endorsement. But that’s not how the Register presented it, nor how it was perceived. Iowa State’s administrators were not amused when people started pestering them with questions about why the university was promoting marijuana (especially when those people were from the Iowa Governor’s Office of Drug Control Policy).
University officials sought to clear the air, if you will, by changing the rules under which student groups are allowed to use school logos. The new rules just happened, in effect, to proscribe student weedvocates from putting Cy the Cardinal and a marijuana leaf on the same T-shirt.
This being America, the students sued, arguing the school was infringing on their right to free speech. After a few years of legal wrangling, the appeals court affirmed the ruling that Iowa State had “discriminated against that group on the basis of the group’s viewpoint.”
Any victory for free speech on campus is welcome, which may explain the odd assortment of conservative groups who weighed in along the way. Amicus briefs supporting the marijuana crowd were filed by such non-beatnik types as Students for Life of America, Ratio Christi, the Christian Legal Society, and the Young America’s Foundation. It seems that marijuana has to be at issue to keep campus free speech from going to pot.
