The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) raises the flag of victory for campus First Amendment protections!

A head-scratching case of censorship involving a telecommunications professor, an Italian flag, an office window, and a policy designed to regulate outdoor signs and structures has fortunately come to a satisfactory end at Indiana’s Ball State University.

For roughly four years, Professor Dominic Caristi, a professor in Ball State’s Department of Telecommunications, hung a flag unobtrusively in his office window. Initially, Caristi hung the Greek flag—a reference to his selection as a Fulbright scholar to Greece. Later, he replaced it with the Italian flag, a nod to his heritage.

This past February 11, however, Associate Vice President of Facilities Kevin Kenyon asked Caristi to remove the flag. Caristi complied with the request but asked that Kenyon show him the specific policy governing expression in this area. …

Caristi contacted FIRE, and we wrote to Ball State President Jo Ann M. Gora on April 29. Our main point was a simple and intuitive one: Policies written to govern outdoor expression can’t be used to govern indoor expression, unless we want to throw overboard our system (a useful one, I submit) of anchoring particular meanings to words so that, for instance, people can have an idea of what expression is actually governed by policies on campus expression. …

This is a good start for Ball State. It is possible for the university to craft a policy governing expression in areas like the windows of faculty offices (which have often been viewed as a traditional venue of faculty expression) that provides appropriate guidelines for such expression within constitutionally permissible bounds. Fortunately, Ball State also understands the need for any such policy to be consistently applied in a viewpoint-neutral manner. And of course, as this case has shown, such policies can’t be effective if they are used to govern expression clearly outside their defined scopes.

We appreciate Ball State’s acknowledgment that its policies fell short and commend it for promising to work to make its policies clearer. Of course, FIRE’s door is open if Ball State wants to use the opportunity of working on its new campus master plan to also take a look at its various “yellow light” speech codes, further strengthening its commitment to free speech.