Lawsuit Alleges Oklahoma State University’s Policies Violate Free Speech

Edmon Low Library on the Oklahoma State University Stillwater Campus in Autumn 2008. Helluvamatt/CC-BY-3.0/Wikimedia Commons

A free-speech group has filed a lawsuit against Oklahoma State University (OSU) over policies that it alleges violate constitutional rights to free speech.

The lawsuit, filed by Speech First, a Washington-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense of freedom of expression on campuses, challenges several university policies that it says “deter, suppress, and punish speech about political and social issues of the day.”

“Under these policies, students can be disciplined for ambiguously defined ‘intimidating’ speech, discussing politics in emails, commenting in class, or even, in the words of the University, for showing ‘a disproportionate weight in favor of or against an idea or thing,’” the group said in a Jan. 10 statement.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Cherise Trump, executive director of Speech First, no relation to Donald Trump, said that contrary to what people might expect, some of the most serious cases of censorship that have come to her organization’s attention have happened on campuses in “red” states, namely Texas, Florida, and now Oklahoma.

For a university to try to censor words and curtail students’ legal political activities, while drawing on taxpayer money, sets the school directly at odds with the explicit language of the First Amendment, Trump noted.

“Public universities are taxpayer funded, and therefore extensions of the state, and they are going to be very much more beholden to the Constitution than private universities,” Trump said.

“Obviously, Oklahoma is a red state and you would think they would be favorable to the Constitution. But students there have told us the campus is not friendly to free speech.”

Trump said that the public character of the university hasn’t stopped it from enacting and enforcing official policies that bar students from engaging in online activity that wouldn’t get them into trouble at most schools and that make it easy for one student to report another for perceived “bias,” without offering a clear definition of what such bias does or doesn’t entail. This has resulted in a censorious atmosphere and an environment where students who might otherwise want to engage in good faith in discussion or debate over social and political topics refrain from speaking up, for fear of the potential consequences.

In its complaint against OSU, filed in the Western District of Oklahoma on Jan. 10, Speech First draws attention to the school’s policies regarding the use of computers, under which it’s a punishable offense for a student to use his or her OSU email account to “transmit political campaigning.” Under OSU’s Code of Conduct, the complaint alleges, violations of this policy can result in the offender being locked out of the school’s network.

The complaint characterizes OSU’s email accounts and internet networks as “traditional public forums” and charges that the prohibition against the transmission of such political content amounts to “a content-based restriction on political speech” and therefore a violation of the First Amendment.

Right to Assemble

In her interview with The Epoch Times, Trump characterized this prohibition as one that would curtail totally harmless activities, not just on the part of conservative students but of those with any ideology or affiliation.