Kevin Shaw, a student at Pierce College in California, has filed a lawsuit against his college with the hopes of liberating more than 150,000 students from being forced to use unconstitutional free speech zones.
The lawsuit, which challenges Pierce College and its community college system, came after Shaw was merely exercising his free speech rights on campus. Shaw, who is studying Political Science and Philosophy, told Red Alert in an interview that all the trouble started when he started passing out copies of the United States Constitution printed in Spanish.
Shaw, who is also a member of Young Americans for Liberty (YAL), was passing out constitutions as a way to raise awareness and recruit new members to his chapter.
“There are many Americans for whom English is a second language, and they should be able to appreciate our founding documents too,” Shaw told Red Alert.
The administration intervened promptly.
“They told me I was only permitted to speak in the ‘free speech area’, and they made me sign a ‘free speech permit’,” he said.
Pierce College is one of nine schools in the Los Angeles Community College District, which serves more than 150,000 students, that has an unconstitutional “free speech zone.” At Pierce, the ‘free speech zone’ comprises only 0.003 percent of the entire campus area. Shaw was told by an administrator that if he didn’t move to the free speech zone, he would be removed from campus.
Shaw noted that the free speech zone policy isn’t advertised to students. There isn’t anything on the college website that indicates the school has a free speech zone.
“The rule is essentially invisible to students, until they enforce it,” he said.
For more than a month, the college administration seemed to ignore Shaw, he said. Finally he reached out to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Higher Education, for guidance. They’re now serving as counsel for the lawsuit along with Arthur Willner, a partner at Leader & Berkon, LLP.
Shaw hopes free speech zones become a thing of the past.
“It is my hope that by the end of this, Pierce college and the district at large will recognize the entirety of the USA as a ‘free speech zone’, and stop restricting the expression of peaceful students on campus,” he said. “This policy has been in place since 1987, three years before I was even born… with any luck, no students that attend after I graduate will face the same troubles.”
Cliff Maloney Jr, the President of Young Americans for Liberty said that this incident aligns with their ongoing free speech campaign.
“A majority of America’s higher education institutions maintain some type of restrictive speech code that infringes on the First Amendment rights of its students,” Maloney said. “At YAL, we launched the national Fight for Free Speech campaign to overturn unconstitutional speech codes and defend the rights of every student to speak freely.”
Pierce College and the LA Community College District did not respond to Red Alert‘s requests for comment about their unconstitutional ‘free speech zones’.
