On September 18, administrators at Penn State removed 35 newstands containing copies of the Daily Collegian, the university’s independent student newspaper. Penn State claimed that the newsstands were removed because poster-sized ads on the stands violated university policies restricting “commercial sales activities.” At the time they were removed, three of the newspaper racks held ads for Kamala Harris, while six others displayed voter registration ads.
Removing the stands made no sense. The newsstands had featured similar advertisements in previous years without an issue, and removing 35 newsstands along with the papers they contained was an unnecessarily extreme, censorious, and labor-intensive way to tell the newspaper it had violated school policies. (The Collegian eventually got the stands back, but many of the papers had vanished.)
Unfortunately, Penn State didn’t stop there. FIREand the ACLU of Pennsylvania have now received complaints that Penn State is unconstitutionally prohibiting students from engaging in election-related political speech including voter registration and canvassing, on campus.
The First Amendment unambiguously protects in-person voter engagement activities such as urging students to register to vote or to support particular candidates. These are exactly the types of interactive, one-on-one communication that is core to American liberal democracy and which the First Amendment was designed to protect.
Newspaper theft by state actors — such as state university officials — is an egregious violation of the First Amendment and must not be allowed to go on at public universities. Moreover, protecting political speech is at the heart of the First Amendment, and while trying to convince people to vote your way is the most obvious example of political speech in a democratic society, not far behind that is convincing them to vote at all.
You can stand up for free speech rights at Penn State. Send an email to President Bendapudi today, urging Penn State to clean up its act and recommit to freedom of expression.
