shut down speech. Administrators, being people, exercise this power for both good and bad reasons, for higher purposes and selfish ones. Students and even faculty members learn to watch what they say, or to retreat into groups of the likeminded.
YOU ARE A SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD JUNIOR IN HIGH SCHOOL. It’s fall, and you have decided to get an early jump on your college campus visits to see where you want to apply. Your parents are trying to steer you towards a public college, since the prices of the top private colleges are, as your father says, “highway robbery.” You think he must be wrong. Your parents need to understand that college is considered mandatory for most jobs these days, and a big-name school holds the key to a stellar career. Besides, everyone else seems to have figured out how to pay for college, right?
While your heart is still set on Harvard and Yale and you have secretly promised yourself you will apply to them, you clamber into your mother’s aging Ford Taurus and visit some state colleges. After a seeming eternity in the car, you are now on a guided tour of Big State University, a school so large that there are twice as many students enrolled as people in your home town. Maybe it’s the fall chill or just the newness of the whole thing, but you find yourself excited as the good-looking sophomore begins your tour of the campus. It is a vast complex, with a library the size of the hospital where you were born, a cafeteria that seems to go on for days, and lecture halls that could hold your entire high school.
At one point during the tour, you pass a twenty-foot-wide octagonal gazebo. Jason, an irreverent potential classmate, laughs. “Ah, the infamous ‘free speech gazebo.’”
“Like ‘Speakers Corner’ in London?” you ask, showing off your Quiz Bowl knowledge. Jason shrugs, not knowing what you are talking about. “A place where you can always speak your mind no matter what?” you add.
“You wish,” he says. “It’s the only place on campus designated for ‘free speech activities’ and you have to reserve it days in advance.”
You laugh, but then pause. He isn’t serious, is he?
Trevor Smith was unaware of Texas Tech University’s free speech zone before he decided to enroll. But when he began to organize a protest against the war in Iraq in February 2003, he was told that he had to limit his group to the campus’s twenty-foot-wide “free speech gazebo.”1 This was the sole area where Texas Tech’s 28,000 students could engage in any free speech activities, from handing out flyers, pamphlets, or newspapers, to holding demonstrations. Requests to engage in these time-honored forms of campus expression outside of the gazebo had to be “submitted at least six university working days before the intended use.”2
The gazebo was much too small to hold all the students who might wish to engage in an average protest. I asked a friend of mine with a math degree from MIT to do a dimensional analysis of the gazebo. What if all the students at Texas Tech wanted to exercise their free speech rights at the same time? My friend calculated that you would have to crush them down to the density of uranium 238 to jam all 28,000 students into the gazebo.
Trevor Smith wondered how he could have an effective protest in a tiny gazebo in a tiny corner of the huge campus. If no one can hear or see your protest, what’s the point? So Trevor appealed to FIRE for help. By that time, I had been at the organization for two years and was learning that every time I thought I’d seen it all, I would confront something like the free speech gazebo. I wrote to the university:
Texas Tech’s nearly 28,000 students deserve more than 20 feet of freedom (approximately 1 foot of freedom per 1,400 students). This caricature of constitutional law should be anathema to any institution committed to intellectual rigor, robust debate, and a free and vibrant community. We call on you to tear down the barriers to speech and declare all of Texas Tech University a “free speech area.”3
The tone may have been melodramatic, but I meant every word. With pressure from FIRE and unfavorable press coverage, the university decided to let Trevor’s protests proceed as planned and expanded the free speech zone. Merely expanding the zone, however, was not good enough, especially since Texas Tech also maintained a broad speech code. So in June 2003, the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian litigation organization, launched a lawsuit against Texas Tech in coordination with FIRE. The resulting 2004 decision in Roberts v. Haragan overturned Texas Tech’s remarkably restrictive free speech zone policy, declaring that all open areas on campus are presumed to be available for free speech activities.4 The decision also overturned the campus speech codes that banned, among other things, “insults” and “ridicule.”5
One might think that restricting free speech to tiny areas of campus is an eccentricity unique to Texas Tech that ended after a defeat in court. Sadly, restrictive and out-of-the-way free speech zones have been around for a long time and show little sign of disappearing.
I have never been able to determine the precise genesis of campus “free speech zones.” Many such zones popped up during the campus free speech movement of the 1960s and ’70s, but it isn’t clear when they were transmogrified from an additional area on campus where one could always engage in free speech, to a method of restricting free speech to as small a space as possible. I suspect this change took place in the late 1980s and through the ’90s, during the accelerated bureaucratization of campuses that I address later in this chapter. In The Shadow University, Kors and Silverglate recount efforts to fight back against free speech quarantines, starting with a successful battle at Tufts University in 1989.6 Other attempts to impose tiny zones had been defeated at Oklahoma State University, the University of South Florida, and the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater.7 I had been at FIRE for only a few weeks before I started running into these zones.
The first case that I encountered was at West Virginia University, where Professor Daniel Shapiro and students Matthew Poe and Michael Bomford were leading the fight against the school’s two tiny zones, bringing together groups like the College Democrats, the College Republicans, and the West Virginia Animal Rights Coalition to protest the policy.8 Even added together, the two zones limited free speech to less than 1 percent of the total campus. It took nearly a year and a half, and a dozen detailed letters, to get the zones opened up and the policy liberalized. When a libertarian litigation group called the Rutherford Institute filed suit, it was the final straw—the university finally abandoned the zones. Over the course of the following years, fighting absurd free speech zones became a staple of my work. We challenged these zones at scores of schools, including the University of North Texas, the University of Central Florida, the University of Nevada at Reno, Clemson University, Citrus College in California, Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, California State University at Chico, Tarrant County College in Texas, and Appalachian State University.9
Many campuses that imposed free speech zones were not content with limiting free speech to a tiny fraction of campus, but also applied onerous rules within those zones. At Western Illinois University, for example, you had to apply forty-eight hours in advance to use a zone that was smaller than a classroom.10 It took student and faculty protests, along with bad publicity, to get the school to expand the zone in 2003. At Valdosta State University, the same school that kicked out Hayden Barnes for his Facebook collage, the free speech zone consisted of one small stone stage, which also required forty-eight hours’ notice to reserve. Furthermore, it was available for only two hours a day, from the “hours of NOON to 1 PM and/or 5 PM to 6 PM.” It was not until FIRE took out a full-page ad in U.S. News and World Report’s college ranking edition in 2008 that Valdosta backed down from this unconstitutional policy.11
Speech zone policies have won our Speech Code of the Month title many times. Our July 2007 SCOTM (yes, the acronym sounds a little gross to us too) went