Published time: September 20, 2013 21:40
AFP Photo / Emmanuel Dunand
A college student from California is making waves this week after being told he couldn’t pass out copies of the United States Constitution on campus.
Robert Van Tuinen, 25, was attempting to hand out complimentary
copies of the US Constitution at Modesto Junior College in
central California on Tuesday when a police officer informed him
that he could only distribute pamphlets on campus if done from
within a designated free-speech area that requires weeks of
notice to reserve.
“Anytime anything is being passed out it has to be… you have
to go through the Student Development office,” said the
officer.
“Don’t I have free speech, sir?” Van Tuinen responded,
clutching copies of the Constitution.
“But do you know what this is?” he asked. “What are the
rules? Why are the rules tied to my free speech?”
When the student said he wanted to start a group named Young
Americans for Liberty, the officer said, “That’s fine, but if
you’re going to start an organization like that you have to go
through the rigamarole.”
Van Tuinen raised his objections with the officer and recorded
video of the confrontation, as well as an impromptu meeting
shortly after with a campus administrator, who told the student
there is “a time, place and manner” restriction when it
comes to distributing material on campus. The earliest he could
be allowed to demonstrate “in front of the student center, in
that little cement area” would be September 20, she told him,
and at one point dismissively said “you really don’t need to
keep going on.”
The video of the incident has since been widely shared across the
Web in the days since and has garnered Van Tuinen the support of
the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.
“Watching the video is a combination of depressing and
nauseating, to see what rigamarole students have to go through
just to express themselves on campus,” Robert Shibley, senior
vice president FIRE, said to Fox News.
In an official statement, Shibley wrote that the incident
“should send a chill down the spine of every America.”
“Virtually everything that Modesto Junior College could do
wrong, it did do wrong,” Shibley said. “It sent police to
enforce an unconstitutional rule, said that students could not
freely distribute literature, placed a waiting period on free
speech, produced an artificial scarcity of room for free speech
with a tiny ‘free speech area’ and limited the number of speakers
on campus to two at a time. This was outrageous from start to
finish. Every single person at Modesto responsible for enforcing
this policy should have known better.”
“Passing out flyers outdoors is one of the most
Constitutionally-protected activities there is,” he added to
The Daily Caller. “Every single person enforcing this should
have realized something was wrong.”
Lisa Hoile, a public relations officer at the community college,
told Fox that students are asked to pass out materials only in
certain areas in order to avoid disrupting campus operations, but
said, “In the case of the YouTube video, it does not appear
that the student was disrupting the orderly operations of the
college and therefore we are looking into the incident.”
The incident occurred on Sept. 17 — 226 years to the day after
the Constitution was signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Copyright: RT