While I'm relieved that the College Republicans at San Francisco State will not face punishment, their exercise of free speech should not have been put on trial.

�We are relieved that SFSU has come to its senses and recognized that it cannot punish students for constitutionally protected expression,� FIRE President Greg Lukianoff said. �But the fact remains that the university should never have investigated or tried them in the first place. This was a protected act of political protest and it is impossible to believe the university did not know that from the start.�

Yesterday afternoon, President Corrigan wrote to FIRE with the welcome news that �the Student Organization Hearing Panel (SOHP) unanimously concluded that the College Republicans organization had not violated the Student Code of Conduct and that there were no grounds to support the student complaint lodged against them.�

The trial, however, is a farce. David Frum reviews the history of San Francisco State's bouts of anti-Semitism and concludes:

There is obviously something profoundly wrong on American campuses... Apologists for terrorism receive maximum protection for the most vicious bigotry, for menace and intimidation, and even outright violence. Yet that zeal for free speech vanishes altogether when opponents of terrorism engage in much, much milder forms of protest. This goes beyond double standards. It is a moral collapse.

Labels: censorship, higher education