The University of Central Florida has agreed to pay a $35,000 settlement to a campus free speech group that sued the university over its policies on discriminatory harassment and computer use.
Nonprofit organization Speech First, which focuses on campus free speech, announced it had entered into a settlement agreement with UCF five months after the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sustained the organization’s lawsuit against the university for maintaining a bias response team and for its policy on discriminatory harassment, which the organization said violated students’ free speech rights.
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In the settlement, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, the university agreed to pay Speech First $35,000, eliminate the “Just Knights Response Team,” and modify its “discriminatory harassment” policy to protect freedom of speech. The new policy says the university will only consider speech a form of harassment if it is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive as to deny a student an equal access to education,” a standard set out in U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
The university’s previous policy had defined “discriminatory harassment” as conduct that was hostile toward a person or group of people on the basis of race, sex, disability, and political affiliation,” among other categories.
Discriminatory conduct could “take many forms, including verbal acts, name-calling, graphic or written statements (via the use of cell phones or the Internet), or other conduct that may be humiliating or physically threatening.”
In a press release, Speech First Executive Director Cherise Trump said the organization was “happy to say that the students can rest assured their speech rights are in better shape on UCF’s campus today than they were yesterday.”
The group first sued UCF in February 2021 and secured a major legal victory in April, when the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals sustained the organization’s lawsuit, saying Speech First was likely to prevail in its legal battle against the university.
“Our lawsuit led to the elimination of UCF’s Stasi-like bias response team and ensured that the university’s policies actually consider the fundamental rights of their students,” Trump said. “Our win in the Eleventh Circuit not only set precedent in all of Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, but it also guarantees that universities recognize that the law is not on their side when they want to violate their students’ rights and shut down dissenting ideas. These lawsuits aren’t quick, and they require a substantial amount of follow-through, but the results last, and they reverberate across hundreds of campuses.”
In the April ruling, 11th Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom wrote that the university’s policies on discriminatory harassment “likely [violate] the First Amendment on the grounds that it is an overbroad and content-based and viewpoint-based regulation of constitutionally protected expression.”
“It is imperative that colleges and universities toe the constitutional line when monitoring, supervising, and regulating student expression,” the judge wrote at the time. “Despite what we presume to be the very best of intentions, it seems to us substantially likely that the University of Central Florida crossed that line here.”
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The University of Central Florida did not respond to a request for comment.
