EDITORIAL
Free Speech on Campus
Why Mason’s Policies Are Unconstitutional 

George Mason University has a number of professors who are very vocal free speech advocates.  David E. Bernstein, professor of law and the author of You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws, published an article this week in the LA Times discussing the threat posed by “authoritarian political correctness” in academic institutions. John B. Gould, acting director of Mason’s Administration of Justice unit, was cited in a Jan. 12, 2004 National Law Journal article as saying that campus speech codes “were the result of a top-down-and perhaps cynical-effort by school administrators at prestigious schools to project an image of inclusiveness.” It is not surprising that, in a school named after the father of the Bill of Rights, law professors would support the first amendment. What is surprising is the subsequent lack of attention paid to Mason’s own Orwellian speech codes.

Mason policies include language and enforce codes of a type which continue to be struck down as unconstitutional around the nation. They are what lay at the center of the many free speech issues on campus. These policies are the same ones that restrict students’ freedoms of assembly,  religion and speech. It is these clearly illegal policies which regulate club formation, flyer posting and any other first amendment related activity on this campus.

The issue with freedom of speech lies deep in the wording of Mason’s University Policies 1109 and 1110, in which student freedoms are restricted using a wording commonly known as a speech code. Both policies apply to anyone on campus, from university departments, to students, to the general public. The first, dealing with the circulation of posted materials, says that “posting of materials or distribution of flyers/leaflets without prior approval . . . will be considered as littering.” The second policy deals with the sale or distribution of any product or service and states “no use [of the university’s faculties or grounds] shall be permitted which is inconsistent with the mission of the University.”  Both have specific language which allows Mason, at will, to control and prevent the exercise of free speech.

An extensive web of almost identical anti-discrimination regulations backs most Mason policies. These rules allow the Mason administration to take action against anything it unilaterally decides to be offensive, discriminatory or sexist. The definition of offensive language is little more then what is written here, allowing the implementation of these rules to be so broad that anything could fall into these categories. Ironically, this leaves the door open for bias to infect the very decisions that are supposed to prevent such discrimination. The results are clubs that take years to get accreditation, while others sail through the process, imbalance in the views displayed by posters or in distributed flyers around campus and what could only be considered the training of young minds, not to be open, but to be closed. If there is any question about the impact of such close-mindedness on Mason’s students, one need only look to the John Lewis lecture last year, in which Mason students harassed an invited lecturer for speaking his mind.

Mason is a public university; it has no business enforcing rules that restrict first amendment speech. Its only defense is that these policies, in some intangible way, enforce diversity. This is pure fallacy. When Mason students fear to say what they believe, the result is deadly to campus life and student thought. True diversity on campus can only stem from one thing, a diversity of thought.

Mason must dissolve these unconstitutional policies and return first amendment rights to the student body.