A campus free speech case brought by a conservative student group at the University of Alabama at Huntsville was heard before the Alabama Supreme Court Thursday.
“The bureaucrats in the University of Alabama system have made it clear that they view their students’ rights to free expression as secondary to their own desire for control,” JP Kirby, director of Student Rights at YAL, said in a statement Wednesday., created in 2020 and revised in Sept. 2021, enforces some speech restrictions that it says are “viewpoint neutral” and are designed to prevent disruption on campus.
The circuit judge ruled in favor of the university and pointed out that the UAH student was never denied the right to a permit. Attorney General Steve Marshall also filed a brief supporting the university and current state law. In briefs leading up to the arguments, lawyers for the University of Alabama System called the ADF’s appeal a “Sturm und Drang” and urged the court to protect state campuses from “anarchy and mob rule.”
The Eagle Forum, a conservative group that was closely involved in drafting the Alabama Campus Free Speech Act, also filed anThe Forum claimed the university’s policy violated stipulations that campus speech policies must be clear, that it limited topics to “current events” and that it failed to provide “robust protections” for spontaneous speech and assembly.