A First Amendment advocacy group filed a lawsuit against Virginia Tech on Thursday, alleging that the school’s policies suppress its students’ free speech and expression.
The suit, filed in Roanoke in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, challenges four specific university policies that the nonprofit group Speech First believes are “chilling student speech.” The policies include ones related to discriminatory harassment, bias-related incidents, computer use, and flyering, which requires students to obtain approval from the school before distributing literature on campus.
“Through this elaborate disciplinary apparatus, administrators at Virginia Tech have intimidated students into silence, refraining altogether from expressing comments or viewpoints that might be perceived as controversial or offensive. This effort to restrict, and even punish, speech based on content goes against the commitment to academic discourse that is supposed to be paramount in higher education,” Nicole Neily, president and founder of Speech First, said.
Virginia Tech defines on its website that students could violate its anti-harassment policies by mistreating someone on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation, making fun of someone’s disability, telling unwelcome jokes about someone’s identity, putting down people who are older, pregnant, or foreign nationals, or urging religious beliefs on someone who finds it unwelcome.
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Its computer use policy also prohibits students from using university software for commercial or partisan political purposes, such as sending emails to advocate for products or a political candidate.
Speech First filed a similar lawsuit against the University of Illinois in May 2019, which the school settled this year prior to a deadline for Supreme Court review. As part of the settlement, the school’s bias response team declared it had no authority to discipline a student, and it agreed to nix its consideration of reinstating its flyer policy requiring school approval before students may distribute materials promoting an election or political candidate.
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The group has also sent letters to schools asking for the rejection of student-led calls to rename historical buildings or cancel events that promote certain ideologies or beliefs, such as the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life at Georgetown University, which advocates against abortion.
The Washington Examiner contacted Virginia Tech for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
