UC Berkeley was sued by two conservative groups, the Young America’s Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans. The university banned conservative speakers, citing possible violence, not from the conservatives but by the liberals.
It seems to me that if the university were true to it’s claims to be all inclusive, they would let conservatives speak and go after the violent students and outside agitators. The university has agreed to allow conservative speech on campus and they will pay the group’s lawyers $70,000 for their work.
UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said:
“While we regret the time, effort, and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”
I call bulls*#t. The only speakers who the university refused to allow to speak were conservatives. Radical leftist speakers had no problem.
The Young America’s Foundation, a youth conservative group, reacted to the settlement by calling it a victory.
“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,” spokesman Spencer Brown said.
“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.”
Now, it will be interesting to see what the university does the next time violent Nazis from the left decide to turn violent. We know the police chief in Berkeley orders his officers to back off. I want to see if the university allows the same violence on campus.