Attorneys with the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom are representing the Young Americans for Liberty student organization chapter and one of its student organizers at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek sued the school Wednesday in federal court after campus security arrested three people handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution while talking with students about the club on a sidewalk.
The school claims the club supporters violated its Solicitation Policy, which states that students and others must obtain permission from the school before they engage in any expressive activity anywhere on campus, including distribution of any written material. The lawsuit, Young Americans for Liberty at Kellogg Community College v. Kellogg Community College, explains that the policy is unconstitutional for that reason, and also because it grants college officials too much discretion to restrict the content and viewpoint of student speech if it does not “support the mission of Kellogg Community College (KCC) or the mission of a recognized college entity or activity.”
“All public colleges—which are supposed to be the ‘marketplace of ideas’—have the duty to protect and promote the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech,” said ADF Legal Counsel Travis Barham. “Ignoring this duty, KCC arrested these club supporters for exercising this freedom, and, ironically, for handing out copies of the very document—the Constitution—that protects what they were doing.
On Sept. 20 of last year, KCC students Brandon Withers and Michelle Gregoire, along with three other YAL supporters were on a large, open walkway in front of the Binda Performing Arts Center on KCC’s campus talking with students about the club and handing out pocket-sized copies of the U.S. Constitution. Withers, Gregoire, and the other supporters were not blocking access to buildings or pedestrian traffic and were not interfering with any KCC activities or other planned events on campus.
KCC administrators and campus security eventually approached them and said that they were violating the Solicitation Policy because they had not obtained prior permission from KCC, and that they were not allowed to conduct expressive activity in this location on campus.
One of the administrators told the supporters that “engaging [students] in conversation on their way to educational places” is a violation of the Solicitation Policy because it is an “obstruction to their education” to ask them questions like, “Do you like freedom and liberty?,” adding that he was concerned that the students from “rural farm areas…might not feel like they have the choice to ignore the question.”
The officials instructed Withers, Gregoire, and the others that they must immediately stop engaging in their speech activities and leave campus. When Gregoire and two of the other club supporters politely informed KCC’s chief of public safety that they were going to continue exercising their First Amendment freedoms by talking with students and handing out copies of the Constitution, he arrested them and charged them with trespass.
“Today’s college students will be tomorrow’s legislators, judges, commissioners, and voters,” said ADF Senior Counsel Casey Mattox. “That’s why it’s so important that public universities model the First Amendment values they are supposed to be teaching to students, and why it should disturb everyone that KCC and many other colleges are communicating to a generation that the Constitution doesn’t matter.”