Barstow Community College is committed to upholding every individual’s constitutionally protected rights to free expression, speech, and assembly.
The time, place, and manner in which these rights may be exercised are governed by Barstow Community College policies and procedures (BP/AP 3900).
First Amendment Protections
What’s Protected
The First Amendment to the US Constitution protects speech and expressive conduct from censorship by the government based upon its content.
There are very limited exceptions to this protection. Barstow Community College is a part of the government and may not censor speech based on its content.
What’s Not Protected
Unprotected speech generally falls into five categories:
- Defamation – false statements of fact about someone that tend to injure them or their reputation. Defamation is known as “libel” or “slander” if spoken. Persons who defame others can be sued for damages.
- Fighting words or Incitement to Violence – words by which their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of peace. They are personally abusive words, which, when addressed to the ordinary person, are, as a matter of common knowledge, inherently likely to provoke violent reaction.
- Incitement to Violence – words that are intentionally directed by the speaker to provoke a crowd to immediately carry out violence and unlawful action and is likely to produce that action. Examples of this type of speech include challenging another to fight in a public space, use of offensive words in a public place which are inherently likely to provoke an immediate violent reaction, inciting illegal violent activity, or calling a crowd to immediately burn down a building or vandalize a car.
- True threats – statements where the speaker intends to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protects people from the fear of violence and from the disruption that fear engenders, in addition to protecting people from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur. The threat must be, on its face and under the circumstances in which it is made, so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to cause the person threatened to reasonably fear for their own safety or the safety of their immediate family.
- Obscenity – a legal standard that is difficult to meet and is rarely a basis to censor speech.
The following conduct is generally not free speech and may be disciplined or halted:
- Willful disturbance of any lawful meeting (must substantially impair the meeting by intentional conduct in violation of implicit or explicit rules for meeting that the violator knew or should have known)
- Fighting
- Obstruction of a police office in the lawful exercise of their duties
- Unlawful assembly and refusal to disperse
- Vandalism and defacing someone else’s property
- Disturbance by loud and unreasonable noise
- Trespassing
- Theft
