>“Young America’s Foundation is thrilled that, after more than a year of UC Berkeley battling against the First Amendment rights of its own students, the University finally felt the heat and saw the light of their unconstitutional censorship,” said YAF spokesman Spencer Brown.
>UC Berkeley’s hostility toward free speech is well-established. The school appears in the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) annual list of the ten worst colleges for free speech. Berkeley has a “yellow light speech code rating” from FIRE because it restricts speech, denies students accused of misconduct the “right to challenge fact-finders,” and denies students accused of sexual misconduct the right to counsel.
>The administration at UC Berkeley only pretended to adhere to the First Amendment’s speech protections. When conservatives have been scheduled to speak on campus, the administration typically didn’t forbid their appearances. Instead, it made the speeches inconvenient to the point of impossibility, for example, forcing students to use venues a mile off campus or at times when students couldn’t attend. Berkeley also often required non-leftist groups to hand over thousands of dollars to defray security costs, a requirement not rigorously or consistently imposed on left-wing speakers or groups.
>Under the terms of the out-of-court settlement YAF attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon reached with UC Berkeley this past weekend, the university will pay Young America’s Foundation $70,000, rescind its unconstitutional “high-profile speaker policy,” rescind its viewpoint-discriminatory security fee policy, and abolish its heckler’s veto—protesters will no longer be allowed to shut down conservative expression.
>Under the settlement’s provisions, UC Berkeley will no longer be able to impose a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech. Nor will it be able to ban advertisements for YAF-sponsored campus lectures or relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations.
>“Further, the policy that allowed Berkeley administrators to charge conservative students $20,000 for security to host Ben Shapiro—an amount three times greater than the fee charged to leftist students to host liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor—is gone,” according to YAF.
>“YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally. Unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event, the security fee will be zero.”
http://archive.fo/H4wkg
[YouTube] Victory for Free Speech at UC Berkeley (Yvette Felarca FAILED)
