For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about free speech on college campuses.
When Ivette Salazar, a student at Joliet Junior College in Chicago, saw conservative students passing out literature on the evils of socialism on her campus, she decided she wanted to share her own viewpoint and so began distributing pro-socialist fliers with the headline “Shut Down Capitalism.” Instead she was the one who was shut down, detained by campus police and questioned for 15-20 minutes. Her fliers were confiscated after she was told her First Amendment right to free speech only applied if college administrators approved.
That’s not, of course, how the First Amendment works. Luckily Ivette Salazar had, in addition to the courage of her convictions, assistance from FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a campus-speech-rights advocacy group that helped her to mount a court challenge to ensure that she and her classmates, whatever their views, are able to exercise their rights on campus. After Salazar filed a lawsuit against Joliet Junior College in January of 2018, the college agreed to policy changes to better protect students’ free speech rights. On April 18, 2018 Salazar and Joliet Junior College announced that they had reached a settlement agreement to end the lawsuit.