Three conservative students filed a lawsuit against California’s Clovis Community College claiming administrators violated their First Amendment right to free speech by censoring their anti-communist and pro-life flyers.
The three students are members of the college’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter and are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
YAF-Clovis founder Alejandro Flores and club members Daniel Flores and Juliette Colunga received permission from administrators to hang three flyers listing the death tolls of communist regimes on bulletin boards inside academic buildings on campus in November 2021, according to FIRE.
However, a Clovis administrator later wrote in an email that he would “gladly” take the flyers down after receiving complaints, according to emails FIRE obtained via public records request. He also suggested in the emails that it may have been a “mistake” to approve the flyers, saying the school should have banned the flyers under a policy that prohibits “posters with inappropriate or offense [sic] language or themes.”
Clovis President Lori Bennett then ordered the flyers be taken down on November 12, 2021, at which point FIRE alleges she invented “a brand new rule” requiring flyers to double as club announcements in order to justify her decision.
“If you need a reason, you can let them know that [we] agreed they aren’t club announcements,” Bennett wrote despite Clovis having no such formal rule, according to FIRE.
Administrators then used the rule to reject a set of five pro-life flyers that the students submitted for approval in December. Instead of allowing the students to hang the flyers on bulletin boards inside campus buildings, the flyers were banished to a “free speech kiosk” in a remote part of campus.
“By relegating the flyers to a tiny kiosk, Clovis administrators tried to ensure that YAF’s opinions would never reach the rest of campus,” FIRE attorney Jeff Zeman said in a statement. “But FIRE’s here to amplify the voices that censors try to silence and make sure that all Clovis students are heard.”
The suit notes that Clovis, a public college, is bound by the First Amendment and that it is therefore unconstitutional to treat student groups differently based on viewpoints.
FIRE argues that the policy banning inappropriate or offensive terms is overly broad and can allow administrators to “arbitrarily decide which opinions are inappropriate or offensive and which deserve to be heard.”
The lawsuit names the college president and three other administrators as defendants. The suit is against the four administrators in their personal and official capacities.
“By suing these defendants as individuals, not just in their official capacities as Clovis administrators, FIRE and the YAF students not only seek to change the college’s unconstitutional policy and end its practice of censoring students based on viewpoint, but to hold college officials personally accountable for violating students’ clearly established free speech rights,” FIRE explained in a statement.
National Review has reached out to Clovis Community College for comment.