The University of California at San Diego's policies on "offensive" fliers and banners on campus are about to be revised, after settling a lawsuit from a protest poster-making student.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued late last year on behalf of Ryan Benjamin Shapiro, to change a policy which "gave university administrators unbridled discretion to censor fliers and banners on campus that they deemed offensive," says Jordan Budd, managing attorney for the ACLU of San Diego and Imperial Counties.
The settlement calls for a policy revision aimed at preventing university officials "from censoring the content" of fliers, banners, and other notices, the ACLU says. It also calls for UCSD to suspend Shapiro's three-hour community service sentence and purge any mention of the incident from Shapiro's record.
Shapiro has said he tacked up the poster in question - "F*** Netanyahu and Pinochet" - hoping to trigger some human rights debate on campus. But it triggered the university ordering him to take it down and, when he refused, sentencing him to three hours' community service.
The 19-year-old political/economic science major from Los Angeles took his case to the ACLU, who sued on his behalf after a petition to UCSD officials to repeal the punishment was rejected - even though he prepared the petition by researching numerous free speech cases.
University officials seem satisfied with the settlement calling for them to revise the fliers and banners policy, as well as the campus's strictures against so-called "fighting words".
"That policy, we believe, did not meet constitutional requirements, " UCSD attorney Christopher Patti told the Associated Press, "but I think, had it not been with the problems with that policy, Ben Shapiro would not have been disciplined."
The case began when Shapiro fashioned the poster after reading news accounts of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and biological weapons research, and of the arrest of former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, who was charged with crimes against humanity.
