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No free speech zones at WVU

DURING a first-season episode of "The West Wing," President Bartlet accidentally confuses the University with West Virginia University while questioning his daughter's new Secret Service agent. When the agent says she attended the University, he replies with a remark about the school mascot of the Mountaineers. Oops. Beyond some of the other more uncouth jokes made about West Virginia, however, University students would have been thankful recently not to be associated with WVU.

On April 1 of this year, WVU president David C. Hardesty Jr. implemented a policy called the "Policy on Freedom of Expression." Unfortunately, the rules entailed by the policy were not some kind of an April Fool's Day joke. On Nov. 8, though, the Board of Governors of WVU voted to revise the policy and remove previous restrictions on student free speech. Thankfully, the Board had the foresight that Hardesty didn't and altered a policy that the school never should have put on its books in the first place.

At first glance, the title "Policy on Freedom of Expression" sounds like an oxymoron. And in some respects, it is. Many would wonder why a policy as such would be necessary -- free speech, as its name indicates -- is free and should therefore be unrestricted. Hardesty saw a need for the policy to keep demonstrations from getting out of hand. Perhaps his fear was reasonable, but the steps he took to allay it were not.

The restrictions put into place by the policy created areas on campus which students could use for "peaceful dissent, protest or demonstration." These free speech zones made up approximately 5 percent of the campus. The policy also gave school authorities the power to discipline students who demonstrated outside the seven zones, which an ad hoc free speech committee last spring successfully increased from a paltry two.

The zones of free expression did not include certain areas that people would have otherwise expected to be open to protest and demonstration. Some of these restricted areas included main buildings on the campus, the student center and a large percentage of the grounds of WVU.

Undoubtedly, the most ironic location where the policy did not allow demonstration and its other prescribed forms of free speech was the building that contained the campus newspaper. It was hypocrisy in every sense of the word: The place at which the largest expression of free speech occurs every day could not host any other type of free speech. In fact, the operation of the newspaper itself violated the policy under its strict definition. The policy classified free speech into five categories, one of them being distribution of literature. And essentially, that is what the newspaper did every day in an area that was not a free speech zone. Such a contradiction may have seemed like a mere technicality, but it should have been an obvious sign to administrators as to how ridiculous the policy was. Just imagine the recent protest at The Cavalier Daily office -- that could never have happened in the past at WVU.

Besides the blatant infringements on the right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, the policy also presented logistical problems. One of the most obvious difficulties facing possible enforcers of the rules would have been how to define a violation outside one of the designated zones. Depending on the whims of a school official, a student feasibly could have been punished under the distribution of literature category for handing out innocuous fliers for a forum. Another category engendered symbolic speech, a label entirely too ambiguous for comfort and open for a wide variety of interpretations.

Hardesty apparently was afraid of chaos erupting on his campus. Maybe the paranoia made him implement the "Policy on Freedom of Expression." Regrettably, he resorted to creating a sort of martial law in regard to student expression on campus and saw the need to limit protests and other forms of free speech to specific zones. But now that the zones have been eliminated, Hardesty should not concern himself with the possibility of bedlam breaking out at WVU. Regardless of the location students choose for a demonstration, they will still be held accountable under other forms of law such as the university code of conduct and local noise and trespassing ordinances. Students are wise enough to know that their message is best heard and received in an orderly and peaceful manner.

The Board of Governors of WVU, prompted by lawsuits filed by the Charlottesville,Va.-based Rutherford Institute, should be commended for overturning the Draconian measures enacted by Hardesty. Luckily, they were perceptive enough to realize free speech should not be a black market commodity on college campuses.

(Becky Krystal is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. She can be reached at bkrystal@cavalierdaily.com.)

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