What do professional provocateur Ann Coulter and an irreverent student publication called The Koala have in common? Both have seen their unpopular speech shut down by the supposedly "viewpoint neutral" actions of public universities in California.In a series of legal maneuvers, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego are attempting to blur the lines between viewpoint-neutral and viewpoint-discriminatory in ways that, if allowed to stand, will give colleges and universities much greater leeway to suppress speech they don't like.Berkeley's College Republicans filed a lawsuit in April following the cancellation of Ann Coulter's planned speech at the university. The organization accused Berkeley of using an unwritten "high-profile speakers" policy as pretext for discriminating against conservative speakers by limiting them to times of day and locations where they were unlikely to be heard.According to the College Republicans, Berkeley has applied its vague, disputed high-profile speaker policy—which seems to have been hatched in March at a meeting of school administrators, police officers, and city officials, but never actually written down—"in a discriminatory fashion, resulting in the marginalization of the expression of conservative viewpoints on campus by any notable conservative speaker."
Filing a federal lawsuit does not help, California has seceded and the lawsuit gets Sotomayored anyway.
Unfortunately students in California have no law, whatsoever. California has no history of having any worthwhile body of law and students are stuck with 'make shit up', which is just fine with the UC profs who, basically, make shit up.
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