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Last December, Edinboro University of Pennsylvania earned a red-light rating from FIREfor its sexual harassment policy, which unconstitutionally prohibits any "comments about an individual's body, sexually degrading words to describe an individual, offensive comments, off-color language or jokes, innuendos and sexually suggestive objects, books, magazines, photographs, cartoons or pictures."

Since that time, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit—which includes all of Pennsylvania—ruled that Temple University's former sexual harassment policy was unconstitutional. That ruling called into question the constitutionality of speech codes at universities across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware—including at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. In fact, Edinboro was one of twenty public universities in the Third Circuit that received a warning letter from ��֭���� in September 2008, advising it to abandon its unconstitutional speech codes in the wake of the Third Circuit's decision in DeJohn v. Temple University.

Last week, when FIREconducted its annual review of Edinboro's policies for Spotlight, our speech codes database, we found that Edinboro has , making it almost impossible to find by prospective students, their parents, and the general public. Try to get the policy from the page named "" and you'll be asked for a password, too. Try to get the policy from and you'll get an error message. Fortunately, you can still find it on the old website of the , but you have to know where to look ahead of time, because the shows that the policy is "restricted" and, again, you need a password to get to it.

Now, we cannot be certain of the precise catalyst for the sudden veil of secrecy at Edinboro—all we know for sure is that Edinboro took this action sometime between December 10, 2007 (when FIRElast updated Edinboro's Spotlight entry) and today. But whatever the reason, it does not look good for the university. Edinboro cannot skirt its obligations under DeJohn by simply hiding its policy from the public; the truth will come out, and if Edinboro is still violating its students' constitutional rights in direct violation of a federal court decision, there will be consequences.