A campus police officer at the University of Delaware told students to censor a giant, inflatable “free speech beach ball” last week because someone had drawn a penis on the ball — and the word “penis.” Such speech may violate the taxpayer-funded school’s sexual misconduct policy, the cop explained.
The incident occurred on Wednesday. Students representing Young Americans for Liberty had set up a pamphlet-filled table alongside the big beach ball. The idea was to have student passersby express themselves freely on the ball.
A video of the incident shows the campus cop, Michael Slater, instructing a student behind the table on the University of Delaware’s stringent campus speech limitations and sexual harassment policies.
Officer Slater says he could understand that people “could have a discussion” about, say, writing “Donald Trump should be president” but, he says “open dialogue” has its limits.
“Drawing a penis or a swastika or putting the n-word on there,” declares officer Slater, “you know, what does that do? It just opens us up —”
“We’re having a discussion right now,” the student from Young Americans for Liberty observes.
“You have to monitor what people write,” Slater then demands — armed with a gun, wearing a bike helmet and standing by a bike on its kickstand.
Next, the taxpayer-funded school cop explains that writing on a beach ball to celebrate free speech is the same as a nonexistent “hate crime” which might be inscribed on a tree.
“I mean, the same thing like, you know, if somebody wrote something derogatory on a tree,” the cop analogizes, pointing to a nearby mighty oak. “You know, we have to come, we have to investigate. We have to you know, it’s, you know, umm, if it’s racial in nature, if it’s meant to be a hate crime, we have to investigate the crime.”
At around this point, officer Slater rattles off several categories of speech which he claims students must censor on a “free speech beach ball” including speech which someone could interpret as “harassing” or “libel.”
The cop says he appreciates free speech because “like, hey, it’s free speech, umm, people should be allowed to say what they want.”
However, the cop admonishes, “We also gotta, you know, keep in the back of our mind that everything that people say may be, you know, offensive to other people.”
The student from Young Americans for Liberty indicates that he is willing to cover the badly-drawn image of a penis on the beach ball to placate the cop.
“We’ll scribble off the penis,” the student says.
WATCH:
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit civil rights group, has sent a letter to University of Delaware officials advising them about the First Amendment’s speech protections.
“A campus police officer should never ask students to self-censor their constitutionally protected speech,” FIRE representative Marieke Tuthill Beck-Coon wrote. “As a public university, UD must abide by the First Amendment, which has very few exceptions — and subjectively offensive words or images are not one of them.”
Young Americans for Liberty is also speaking out.
“Here we have yet another case of students’ constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech being attacked,” Young Americans for Liberty spokesman C.J. Sailor said in a statement sent to The Daily Caller. “As the recent events at Emory University showed, there’s a fundamental misunderstanding on college campuses, where even the faculty believe in freedom from speech instead of freedom of speech.”
The “free speech beach ball” event at the University of Delaware is part of the student organization’s ongoing national Fight for Free Speech campaign. Young Americans for Liberty chapters at a couple hundred campuses have organized similar events from April 13 to April 20.
The University of Delaware is most famous, of course, because students and administrators came unglued in the fall after a group of students believed they had discovered three nooses hanging from a tree after a Black Lives Matter rally. The discovery provoked a torrent of outrage within hours from minorities on campus who said the nooses — “nooses” — reflected a climate of hate.
Once police actually took a close look at these “nooses,” the hate crime narrative rapidly fell apart because, as school president Nancy Targett later explained, “the three noose-like items found outside Mitchell Hall were not instruments of a hate crime, but the remnants of paper lanterns from an event previously held on The Green.” (RELATED: University Of Delaware Outraged Over Non-Existent Hate Crime)
Some University of Delaware students took the lack of any actual nooses hard. They even insisted a hate crime had still occurred. Unperturbed by the utterly fictional nature of the “hate crime,” the angry students launched an assembly following the incident to speak as though there really had been nooses — and “to find ways to change the campus climate.” (RELATED: Students Double Down, Insist Fake Hate Crime Was Real)
School officials then planned to launch a new “diversity action plan.”
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