NEW YORK ¨C Last September, Vincenzo Sinapi-Riddle, a student at Citrus Community College near Los Angeles, was collecting signatures on a petition asking the student government to condemn spying by the National Security Agency. He left the school¡¯s designated ¡°free speech area¡± to go to the student center. On his way there, he saw a likely prospect to join his cause: a student wearing a ¡°Don¡¯t Tread on Me¡± T-shirt. He stopped the student and they began talking about the petition. Then an administrator came out of a nearby building, informed them their discussion was forbidden outside the speech zone, and warned Sinapi-Riddle he could be ejected from campus for violating the speech-zone rule.
Sinapi-Riddle has now sued Citrus College, a state institution, for violating his First Amendment rights by, among other things, demanding that ¡°expressive activities¡± be confined to the 1.34 percent of campus designated as a ¡°free speech area.¡±
Perhaps the most outrageous part of his experience is how common it is. The vague bans on ¡°offensive¡± language and other ¡°politically correct¡± measures that most people think of when they imagine college speech codes are increasingly being joined by quarantine policies that restrict all student speech, regardless of its content.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.