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Freedom of Speech Silenced
Written by Matt Donnellan
Saturday, 05 May 2007
Late Thursday night a small group of College Republicans
from the University
of San Diego meet on
campus for what seemed like a somewhat routine event, the distribution of flyers
for their weekly meeting. They knew that theses particular filers would be met
with some animosity, so they decided to hang them just before midnight in the
hopes that most people would see them the next day before angry liberals had a
chance to thin the number of flyers, which is a regular occurrence at USD and
about as reliable as the sunrise to follow. The students took two hours and
placed between 175 and 200 flyers, quadruple the school average for an
event. Leaving campus at 1am satisfied that people would not be able to miss
the flyers, which contained simple facts about illegal immigration costs and
the club’s meeting time and place.
By 7am, an
hour before the first classes that day, half the flyers were gone. By noon less
then 20 remained, and by 4pm all the flyers were gone. Two of the students who
helped distribute the filers caught USD grounds keeping staff cautiously taking
down the flyers around 7am. Their reason upon being confronted, the flyers did
not meet the schools technical standards, citing “no date or time”. Clearly all
the flyers had both, and many were posted very close to similar flyers a
humanitarian group placed quoting facts about poverty, AIDS, and the death
penalty. Curiously enough the CR flyers which meet all the standards were
removed, while less then a foot away the other flyers, which did not have any
information beyond the fact and a club name, managed to remain!
In their
defense many of the staff members may be new to their job. A few months ago USD
came under investigation for hiring illegal immigrants, and a number were
coincidentally, if not consequently, fired. The staff members in question may
have been the replacements for the fired staff members, allowing inexperience,
rather then ignorance or bigotry, to be the primary reason they decided to take
down the flyers.
Selective
staff members were not the only guilty party in Friday’s freedom of speech
disaster. By the time only 5% of the flyers remained you could clearly notice
the tape still on the ground where some the flyers stood, only the center of
the flyer was ripped out, which was a clear sign that students, not the staff
responsible for the cleanliness of USD, had also participated in suppressing
free speech.
This had
been on going at USD for years, and Friday, for the first time, the University
acknowledged there was a huge problem, and that problem was not in the infinite
trivial standards the CR flyers never seemed to meet (yet always met), the
problem was freedom.
This problem is clearly not isolated to The University of
San Diego. In the recent weeks students from San
Francisco State, Berkeley, Davis, Sacramento State,
and a dozen other schools throughout California
and the country have seen that freedom of speech is only free if it is liberal
speech.
200 flyers are not that significant in the larger scale of
what College Republicans in California
have been experiencing, being assaulted by union thugs or raging socialists is
far more frightening, but this occurrence is the perfect example of the
absolute dismal treatment conservative speech and ideas receive on college
campuses. It is literally time to make liberals face the facts, freedom of
speech does not go away because you do not like what I am saying.
There were 5 flyers used, Healthcare, Education, Justice, Total, and Amnesty. Email
if you would like copies of any for your own club.
Press 
