The SearchVoat Forum

The student government of the University of North Texas (UNT) is calling on the school to suspend student groups that are accused of making “transphobic posts” in order to “protect the mental, emotional, and physical health” of the transgender community.

...The resolution is also troubling because the SGA has the authority to “grant funding to students for conferences or programming, promote other student organization’s programs, as well as host University-wide events.” At the very least, the resolution suggests that the SGA may take a viewpoint-based approach to evaluating student group funding.

The SGA is responding to students who report feeling unsafe on campus. But any such response must not — and, at a public university like UNT, cannot — violate the First Amendment rights of other students or student groups on campus. The resolution threatens to do just that by chilling the speech of student groups, especially political student groups, who may face repercussions for speech that could be construed as transphobic. (To be clear, if a student’s conduct targeting an LGBTQ student met the threshold for discriminatory harassment as identified by the Supreme Court in 1999 decision Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, it would lawfully be subject to discipline.)

While there is no current enforcement mechanism in the resolution, the call for suspension is explicit, and a copy of the resolution was sent to UNT leadership. The passage of the resolution also suggests SGA may soon change its tack when it comes to approving funding for new student organizations by evaluating them on a viewpoint basis. If so, it would not be alone.

Elsewhere, George Washington University’s student senate passed a resolution earlier this week calling on the university to suspend the campus chapter of the Young America’s Foundation after a series of social media posts about trans issues. And in November, the Wichita State student government signaled it wanted to delegate to other branches of the university its authority to recognize student groups after the Student Government Assocation’s Supreme Court reversed the student senate’s decision to deny official recognition to a campus chapter of Turning Point USA. Last August, California Institute of Technology’s graduate student government implemented new funding guidelines, requiring determining funding for invited speakers based on the university’s “values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In the past few years, there have also been several examples of student governments denying recognition to clubs based on clubs’ viewpoints.

These actions chill student speech. If the resolutions were simply restricted to condemning the speech of the groups in question, it would be an example of “more speech.” But any time that speech is accompanied by a call to defund, suspend, or otherwise silence a group, it crosses the line into censorship.