UC Berkeley: Student group sues university over scheduling of Ann Coulter appearance on campus.
Plans for Coulter speech are censorship, suit claims
A UC Berkeley student group filed a federal lawsuit Monday accusing the university of unconstitutionally censoring conservative speech, days after administrators said they could not safely accommodate right-wing commentator Ann Coulter on campus this week.
Coulter, an author and television commentator, was invited by the Berkeley College Republicans and the nonpartisan BridgeUSA to speak on campus Thursday night. But campus officials said they could not ensure the safety of those who attended because police had learned of threats of violence by both opponents and supporters of Coulter.
The school offered to schedule her talk for September, and when Coulter refused, the university offered a 1 p.m. appearance on May 2. Coulter again declined, saying she was busy that day. She noted the date was part of the week before final exams, known as Dead Week, when
classes are suspended and students are taking time off to study.
The offer was a “sham” because of the timing and because the university, for purported security reasons, was refusing to make large on-campus buildings available for the talk, lawyers for Young America’s Foundation, the sponsor of Coulter’s planned speech, and Berkeley College Republicans said in its U.S. District Court lawsuit.
At the same time, the suit noted, UC Berkeley has recently allowed speakers invited by liberal students — including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, a critic of President Trump’s immigration policies — to appear without similar time-and-place restrictions. Those speeches took place without incident.
Coulter has said she will speak at Berkeley on Thursday regardless of the university’s position because she has a contract.
“I’m showing up this Thursday,” she said in a Fox News interview Saturday evening. “It’s up to the police to keep me safe.”
At a news conference Monday, Harmeet Dhillon, lawyer for the groups that filed the suit, said the College Republicans would likely decide by Thursday whether to host the speaker that day.
Anticipating Coulter’s appearance, the International Socialist Organization called Monday for its members to protest “peacefully” by picketing outside the event and “challeng(ing) the narrative inside.”
Dhillon accused university officials of adopting an unwritten policy that allows administrators to place restrictions on “high-profile” conservative speakers. The restrictions include scheduling their talks at far corners of the campus during class time and saddling the sponsoring groups with unreasonably high security costs, she said.
The lawsuit said university officials “could have taken appropriate security measures to ensure the safety of those attending conservative speaking engagements — as is their duty to all students on campus — but they have refused to do so.”
It said UC officials and police “have permitted the demands of a faceless, rabid, off-campus mob to dictate what speech is permitted at the center of campus during prime time.”
That was a reference to the violence that led UC Berkeley to cancel a scheduled Feb. 1 appearance by another farright speaker, Milo Yiannopoulos, at the student union. The College Republicans said they also had to cancel an April 12 appearance by conservative writer David Horowitz because the university scheduled his appearance before 3 p.m. at a building more than a mile from the center of campus.
In response, UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said the university has applied its policies evenhandedly.
“We’ve had a wide range of speakers across the political spectrum,” including many speakers sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, Mogulof said. “Never in anyone’s memory has so much staff time been devoted in trying to facilitate an event as in this instance.”
Coulter is “welcome on this campus, but at a time and place when police say, ‘Yes, we can provide security,’ ” Mogulof said. “We don’t have a protectable venue” available Thursday.
The lawsuit seeks damages and a court order prohibiting “any unwritten or unpublished policy restricting the exercise of political expression on the UC Berkeley campus.”