NEWS: Check the Temperature in Hell: I Support the College Republicans

POLITICS: Check the Temperature in Hell: I Support the College Republicans

Yep. Me. Subrosa. I’ve been referred to around here as a knee-jerk, bleeding heart, San Francisco liberal (emphasis intentional) more times than I could count, and here I am supporting a group of snot-nosed, spoiled chicken hawks like the College Republicans.

Not only am I supporting them, but I’m supporting them in their lawsuit against none other than my undergraduate alma mater, San Francisco State University. Now, for the most part I loved my time at SFSU, but I did have one extremely bad experience with their administration. It is for that reason that I back the College Republicans unequivocally and think that the SFSU administration should be fired, tarred and feathered, run out of town and ultimately deported. I’m sorry, but that’s just the reality of the situation.

Oh, wait… sorry. I thought I was writing for the Culture board there for a second.

In all seriousness, I do support the SFSU College Republicans in their lawsuit against SFSU. Not because of any bad experience I might have had while on campus, but because the College Republicans are absolutely fucking right. I know, I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

For those of you unfamiliar with California’s university system, it is comprised of primarily two different “levels”. There’s the UC system, which is comprised of name schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA and UCSD and is designed to be the “upper” level where only elite students shall be admitted. When people talk about California’s world-class university system, they generally mean the UCs. Outside of that are the California State Universities, which tend to focus their studies on more vocational pursuits that UCs don’t offer. For example, I declined several UCs to go to SFSU in part because they offered a journalism major. My sister did the same because Fresno State had a good nursing program. The “thinking” goes on at the UCs, but the “doing” goes on at the CSUs. (Or so I tell myself, at least. I’m nothing if not a homer.)

Anyway, because the student communities at CSUs tend to be more transitory and less campus-centered (SFSU, for example, only houses about 5-10% of their students on campus), on-campus activities are downplayed and control of them is more localized. The administrations at CSUs for the most part don’t have to worry about massive student movements so they are freer to attempt to exert control. This is what happened with the College Republicans at SFSU.

First off, if should be pointed out that SFSU is probably the most liberal university of its size in the country. Berkeley gets all the press for being insanely leftist, but that’s mainly lip service from when the students there were actually active in the '60s and '70s. With their high ranking and inability to engage in affirmative action, Cal’s student body has been trending closer to the political center for decades. As a result, many of those liberal minority students who didn’t get into Berkeley and want to stay in the area ended up at SFSU, pushing it further towards the political left. Whereas the Berkeley chapter of the College Republicans is one of the biggest in the country, the SFSU chapter is and always has been pathetically toothless. To be fair, I went there during the Clinton presidency, and things were universally awesome then so maybe their numbers have rebounded a bit since. I don’t know.

Regardless, when they held that political rally against Hezbollah, Hamas and (later) al-Qaida, they weren’t exactly out there protesting abortion rights or carrying “Dick Cheney is my hero” placards. Not that it would matter to this case at all if they had, but they picked some politically safe targets and staged a rally where flags were stomped on. Big whoop.

Unfortunately for them, an opposition student group or two (read: nearly the entirety of the politically active student body) filed a student complaint saying that in stomping on those flags, they violated SFSU’s conduct code, specifically California Code of Regulations tit. 5 § 41301, which states in part that students must “be civil to one another and to others in the community…” The SFSU administration took the complaint and ran with it, engaging in a 5 month long investigation into the students’ actions, despite protest letters from the aforementioned conservative organizations like the ADF and FIRE, as well as other right wing hit-groups like the ACLU.
In March, SFSU finally dropped their investigation. In June, the College Republicans filed suit in federal court, arguing (among other things) that by subjecting them to prolonged scrutiny for their constitutionally protected political actions, they have effectively chilled the discourse of dissenting political opinion and violated their rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Last week, a federal magistrate agreed.

This is where it gets down to brass tacks for why I support the College Republicans’ lawsuit and why it doesn’t matter to me one bit if they knew or not that the Arabic writing on those flags said “Allah.” It’s pretty clear to me from the facts of the rally (particularly the part where they made attempts to black out the word “Allah” when it was brought to their attention) that the Republicans’ intent was not to intimidate Muslims. Rather it was to make a political statement against what they regarded to be terrorist organizations. Regardless of whether or not we think their message is trite or needlessly fear-mongering, that message is still constitutionally protected political speech. Thus, when you have a code of conduct that legitimizes months-long formal inquiries into legitimate political expression, then we’ve got a problem.

The problem here, which seemed to be articulated by the magistrate, is that the code of conduct is overbroad. While there is certainly some benefit to having a code that requires some level of civility (i.e. no harassing or intimidation), the term itself is far too over-inclusive to provide any meaningful limit on it. Does a prohibition against incivility reach garden-variety insults (“your opinion is fucking stupid”)? We don’t know. Even more troubling is the fact that the administration had to think for even a split-second about whether the civility requirement could be used to punish the College Republicans here. If its even arguably applicable, then the regulation is going to chill legitimate expression. And that, my friends, is constitutionally unacceptable.

So yeah. Go College Republicans. For once.

Tee hee.

Wait. They're suing for $5000 for a disciplinary hearing that found they'd done nothing wrong? Were there extraordinary legal fees involved here? Did they all hire their fathers' high-class lawyers to defend them from charges that had no Constitutional basis? I do not get what the big deal is here.

$5000 is hardly extraordinary when it comes to legal fees. It's a tack on request for monetary damages as a result of the alleged denial of their Constitutional rights. It's a nominal amount. They won't win it, they know it, it's just something that people do in these types of law suits because they can just in case.

In that case the situation just seems like crybaby egotism.

I'm kinda confused, so I'll be honest I stopped reading at a point.

QUESTION: If the student group was not penalized or censured, how could the judge construe a violation of the "be civil clause" as requisite for punishment? That is, the group was not civil and they weren't punished regardless of the fact that it was included in the CoR. So doesn't that mean there's no violation of their FARights?

HSU is better. just sayin'.

The judge ruled (well, actually, he issued a temporary injunction in the anticipation of ruling later) that the civility clause was unconstitutional on its face. You don't need to prove actual damages or even that it was unconstitutionally applied in this case to get that sort of ruling.

Hippie.

I see, so he said it's no good regardless of how the university acted. That makes more sense I suppose although it seems a bit like he's projecting how the university interprets such a clause given the lack of action. But alas, I have much to learn about constitutional law...

I disagree. If you've got a code that has the potential to stymie legitimate political expression (even setting aside their allegations that the length and extent of investigation itself was a de facto punishment for their legitimate political expression), then I think it's completely appropriate to challenge it in court to prevent a chilling effect.

Nope. They can challenge the constitutionality of the policy, whether they were ultimately punished under it or not. The argument is that the existence of the policy, as it's currently laid out, is a violation of student rights.

Yeah, I'm getting that now. But this is sort of what I'm thinking and correct me if I'm wrong: take any law that is "obtuse" (because let's face it "be civil" terminology is quite vague) do you not have to wait to see how the law (or in this case University Code) is applied or interpreted to see whether or not it is constitutional? I'm gathering that you do not... but that seems a bit confusing to me. Perhaps there are more concrete historical examples someone could cite for me.

I agree, but to do it in such a completely egomaniacal way just makes them come off as total assholes, whether they're correct or not. And it certainly doesn't garner them much sympathy.

Besides, what happened in those five months? Did they exert a lot of financial strain? Were they jailed? There didn;t seem to be much punishment, de facto or not, during what was a necessary investigation given the fact that such a large complaint was brought against them. If anything, they should sue the leaders of the student organizations who brought the complaints, not the school, which was simply following procedure. That's what really makes them seem like assholes; the university bears no responsibility for the actions of its student organizations.

The issue is with the investigation. They put the students through a bunch of crap for a needlessly long period of time. If the investigation had found them innocent in a reasonable amount of time I doubt it would have gone this far even though the rule violates the students rights.

All it did was investigate complaints. It didn't even find the CR guilty. It seems the administrators are keenly aware of the broadness of their conduct policy, aware enough at least to know the CR wasn't guilty of anything. What they (the CR) should have done was requested to the administration that they limit their policy, if anything threaten a lawsuit, and try to get the University to change its policy peacefully without resorting to the attention-mongering that this suit amounts to.

I went to a school where the College Republicans predominated, and a douchier group of Reagan slurpers you've never seen.

That said, I'm with you. Protected political speech is protected political speech, even for 21st century Alex P. Keaton armchair warmongers.

Well, first off, I disagree that this is attention mongering (or if it is, if that's even a bad thing), but I think there's something to their allegations that the investigation itself denied them their Constitutional rights.

Time in college is a finite resource, and there were 5 months of these student's time in college where they were, in effect, denied the ability to engage in constitutionally protected activity. True, it's not exactly Brown v. Board, but there's still damage there. Now, depending on how close the CR's version of the facts were to the actual facts, I don't have a single problem with them trying to be compensated for that damage, especially considering how nominal their demand is.

Really, my guess is that FIRE convinced them to sue in order to see if they could knock out the civility code. That seems to be the main thrust of their suit.

Seriously.

But they didn't even try. Thus, egotism.

If the potential for the limitation of free speech exists, steps need to be taken to remove that potential. If it takes "attention mongering" on the part of a particular group to get it done, then so be it.

That I understand. For the sake of argument, I was assuming that the investigation didn't put any undue restraint on the members of the student group (i.e. the investigation didn't put them out in any way).

It's difficult for me to believe folks still have a hard time seeing this - the simple fact is that left unfettered by a strong opposition, the far left is and always has been just as capable and willing to be repressive as the far right. The 20th Century was full of horrendous examples of that truth.

Whether the College Republicans are whiny dweebs (no doubt they are) is completely irrelevant. The issue here is that the power of the institution was used to intimidate students expressing an unpopular opinion and unreasonably limit their right to free speech. That was wrong, no less wrong than if the SFSU were being run by Cheney disciples who used their power to harass peaceniks who trampled an American flag in protest of America's recent military campaigns.

You know. I should have finished reading the entire argument, because this

pretty much clears up all my misunderstandings, and makes total sense.