There’s something oxymoronic about free speech zones. Figures the campus libertarians would get that.

K. Maxwell Greenwood of FSU News reports.

Open platform areas draw criticism from students

Standing near Oglesby Union, just outside of Moore Auditorium on the campus of Florida State University, it isn’t uncommon to see a group of students verbally clashing with an evangelist standing on a bench.

For many students, the locale has come to represent an area of ideological conflict. For the University, it is an open platform area—a designated free speech zone…

Currently, FSU maintains two designated open platform areas—one on the north side of the university’s Doak Campbell Stadium and another outside of Moore Auditorium near the FSU Oglesby Union. Landis Green, the campus’s largest green area and a common gathering place for students, was previously an open platform area but has recently been made available only to student groups that reserve the space.

But some students, such as FSU College Libertarian Member David Brunal, claim that free speech on college campuses is diminishing. Last September, Brunal, along with the College Libertarians, set up a free speech wall on the University’s iconic Landis Green. Passing students were given the opportunity to write whatever they wanted on the 16-foot-long, paper-covered wall, as a way of promoting free speech rights on campus.

“Free speech on college campuses, it’s something that’s slowly disappearing and the administrative language restricting it is tightening up,” Brunal says. “It’s our most fundamental right, it encompasses so much of our day-to-day lives and if we don’t do something to increase awareness then we run the risk of letting it go completely.”

Brunal is not alone in his concern for free speech on college campuses. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization that advocates for individual rights at colleges and universities, ranked FSU among the nation’s “red-light institutions,” colleges and universities that maintain at least one policy that restricts freedom of speech.