Any defeat of “speech codes” on college campuses is a victory for free speech and higher education as well.

Robert Shibley of The FIRE reports.

Victory: Ohio College Settles First Amendment Lawsuit, Scraps Speech Code

DAYTON, Ohio, March 12, 2013—Ohio’s Sinclair Community College (SCC) has settled a First Amendment lawsuit by revising an unconstitutional speech code that prohibited students and visitors from holding signs on campus. The plaintiffs’ attorneys confirmed this week that the terms of the settlement have been accepted by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.

The lawsuit, filed last July on behalf of students Ruth Deddens and Ethel Borel-Donohue and invited speaker Bryan Kemper, director of Youth Outreach for Priests for Life, was prompted by SCC’s brazen violation of the First Amendment at a campus religious freedom rally held on June 8, 2012. At the rally, police officers forced event attendees and participants to put away their handheld signs communicating the protesters’ message, citing the college’s speech code.

Incredibly, SCC President Steven Lee Johnson told the Dayton Daily News that the ban on signs was necessary because of “safety and security” concerns. Invoking the tragic Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, Johnson said that banning signs was justified because signs could be used as weapons, telling the Daily News that the restriction “has nothing to do with what was printed on those objects, but what those objects could be used for.”

Under the revised Campus Access Policy adopted by SCC in the wake of the lawsuit, “any person or group may use, without prior notification, any publicly accessible outdoor area” (with some exceptions) for the purposes of “speaking, non-verbal expressive conduct, the distribution of literature, displaying signage, and circulating petitions.”

“This settlement should send a clear message to colleges in Ohio and across the nation that unconstitutional speech codes aren’t worth defending,” said Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which came to the students’ defense.