I agree “free speech zones” are an abomination, but you really think it is not the government’s business at all to restrict when or how one exercises free speech rights? Is outside your bedroom window, every night, from 2 am to 6 am, via amplified speech o.k. with you?
I said above time and place restrictions are okay if limited - and in fact I have argued for the use of them to prevent the disruption of funerals. Courts have found these restrictions to pass muster if they are limited in various ways.
Personally, I feel free speech zones are too restrictive, and the policy above where demonstrations are barred for the duration of an entire academic year - I cannot see how that passes constitutional muster. As I said before, that makes a mockery of a time and place restriction by marking no time as appropriate and no place as available.
I can understand why schools ban all demonstrations/rallies. It’s actually easier under FA jurisprudence to do that than to pick and choose which to ban. On the other hand, I also think it is a cop out of their mission to educate for life.
The school has to set content free restrictions on demonstrations and meetings. The problem is, this doesn’t sit well along side the hate speech codes which schools have, which are by their very nature content based.
Free speech requirements can apply to private universities, but only if they have held themselves out as not restricting speech based on content. Obviously Liberty doesn’t fall under that category…
Sampiro, Sorry but you weren’t quite right much earlier, on the question of violence. You posted that Liberty, like Old Dominion and UVa were all between 20,000 and 30,000 thousand students, and that crime statistics were similar. Look at the Liberty website and you find that they say they have 20,000 plus students, but only 11,000 are on campus, the rest are online. So that would seem to make the on campus crime rate twice of Old Dominion and UVa, would’nt it?
Kinda like “Disco’s Greatest Hits.” How did such an utterly worthless piece of savagery, barbarism and ignorance even have any form of federal accreditation in the first place?! :mad:
Please don’t denigrate disco in this manner. Don’t put it in the same category as a crap Fundie “university”.
It’s got a great beat and you can dance to it! I heart my disco. 
Ooh, good catch.
Actually it’s not, but aside perhaps from U.S. military colleges or training centers I don’t think any school is. It’s accredited by SACS, which is a non-profit/non-governmental agency that accredits schools in the southeastern region. (It has “sibling” organizations in all regions of the U.S…) There are other accreditation agencies (including several religious ones) but SACS and its full siblings in New England, the Middle States, the West, etc., are by far the most important and the most prestigious.
I’ve worked at two colleges, both public, during the year they were being reviewed by SACS (they’re reviewed annually on some things but the BIG REVIEW is about once every ten years) and it is a pain in the ass. They comb over everything. In libraries for example (which is my area) there are corps books that all libraries should have, plus corps books for each discipline, and there should be no books on medicine that are older than 7 years (the only exceptions being if medical history is taught or if there is no newer book on the topic), etc… If SACS places you on probation- and some very big and prestigious schools have been placed on probation or have departments that have been- it’s a very big deal and you do whatever it takes to come up to date.
A bit off-topic, but there’s a “gathering storm” now other than gay marriage, which is student:faculty ratio. Currently most universities, especially public, are having major financial problems; two ways they’re addressing them is by not filling faculty positions that come vacant and by stopping just short of topless dancers to increase enrollment. SACS has strict guidelines on faculty:student ratio for courses (particularly upper level courses- a huge university can get away with a certain number of auditorium style freshman survey courses but not for upper level requirements). This is going to cause some major problems as some of these institutions who have raised the number of students and lowered the number of faculty come up for review.
Part of it really is BS, particularly the SACS’ buzzwords. For years it was “diversity”. Schools had to rewrite every mission statement of every department to prove that they loved them some diversity and incorporate diversity into everything- nobody really knew what it meant to do that, but you had to do it- so students got sick of hearing the word (and it’s not like most of them had just come from KKK rallies or Black Separatist meetings anyway). Then it was “lifelong learning”- every mission statement had to include that. Now it’s “Polly want some critical thinking? Say critical thinking! Cracker!”.
Now, this doesn’t mean that critical thinking is really getting any more play on campuses than diversity appreciation did, but you do have to pay lip and web service to it.
My only cite is my own personal experience. I considered going to a men’s college back in 1999. I was told that the college offered its own financial aid programs because federally subsidized financial loans were unavailable. It may be that laws have changed since then and when your wife went to school, or that federal loans were only barred to men’s colleges and not women’s colleges due to the Title IX infraction.