Conservatives scored a major legal victory against UC Berkeley which has agreed to compensate Young America’s Foundation and Berkeley College Republicans for trampling the First Amendment rights of conservative speakers and students on its campus.
"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.
"YAF’s landmark victory for free expression—long squelched by Berkeley’s scheming administrators who weaponized flawed policies to target conservatives—shows that the battle for freedom undertaken by YAF on campuses nationwide is a necessary one."
The Trump administration previously weighed in on the side of the campus conservatives who argued UC Berkeley’s restrictive policies violated First Amendment free speech rights and the equal protection and due process guarantees in the Fourteenth Amendment.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest on behalf of the two groups. The department “will not stand by idly while public universities violate students’ constitutional rights,” Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand said at the time.
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.
An aggressive crackdown on non-leftist speech came after Berkeley officials—emboldened by an Antifa mob blocking a Feb. 1, 2017 campus appearance by firebrand Milo Yiannopoulos—decided to formalize viewpoint discrimination in the school’s policy on speakers.
The speech, which was sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center (publisher of Frontpage), itself never happened. Police stood down and allowed left-wing students and activists to “no-platform” Yiannopoulos because they didn’t like his views. Demonstrators caused $100,000 in damage to the campus and several times as much damage to the surrounding town.
Court documents indicate UC Berkeley adopted an unwritten “high profile speaker policy” on March 1, 2017, to impose restrictions on speaking engagements by conservative intellectuals like David Horowitz and Ann Coulter. By Aug. 14, 2017, the university had published a written “Major Events Hosted by Non-Departmental Users” policy to restrict a speech by conservative radio host Ben Shapiro. As a result, Shapiro was reportedly charged $9,000 to speak at UC Berkeley, a fee the school called “lawful and appropriate.”
The threat of violence by Antifa at UC Berkeley also led to the cancelation of a planned on-campus premiere of a documentary film this writer executive-produced, America Under Siege: Antifa, during Yiannopoulos’s planned Free Speech Week at the school.