ACLU of Michigan - Know your Rights when you Protest in potentially tense situations is the best way to ensure that you are treated fairly.
Best Practices for Law Enforcement Officials Policing Demonstrations. Law enforcement authorities have a responsibility to ensure that everyone can enjoy their human right to peaceful assembly.
Free Speech on Campus by Edwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gilman
Excerpt from Chapter 5 : What Campus Can and Can’t Do
- “A campus can’t censor or punish speech nearly because a person or a group considers it offensive or hateful.
- A campus can censor or punish speech that meets legal criteria for harassment, True threats, or other speech acts unprotected by the first amendment.(such as destruction of property or disruption of classes and campus activities)
- A campus can’t prevent protesters from having a meaningful opportunity to get their views across in an effective way.
- A campus can impose time, place and manner restrictions on protests for the purpose of preventing protesters from disrupting the normal work of the campus, including the educational environment and administrative operations.
- A campus can’t impose content based speech restrictions in dormitories.
- A campus can impose content neutral restrictions in dormitories design to ensure a supportive living environment for students.
- A campus can’t censor or punish some speakers, but not others, for putting up handbills writing messages in chalk, or engaging in similar acts of expression.
- A campus can create general content neutral regulations governing on campus expression.
- The campus can’t engage in content based discrimination against faculty, students, or other speakers or writers who seek to express themselves outside the professional context.
- A campus can engage in content-based evaluation of faculty and students who are operating within the professional educational context, as long as this evaluation is based on professional standards or peer assessments of the quality of scholarship or teaching.
- Faculty members may choose to revise students' warnings before presenting material that might be offensive or upsetting to them.
- Colleges and universities should not impose requirements that faculty provide “trigger warnings“ before presenting or assigning material that might be offensive or upsetting to students.
- Campuses can create “safe spaces“ in educational settings that ensure that individuals feel free to express the whitest array of viewpoints, and can support student efforts to self organize in ways that reflect shared interests and experiences.
- Campuses can’t use the concept of “safe spaces“ to censor the expression of ideas considered too offensive for students to hear.
- The campus can’t prohibit students or faculty from using words that some consider to be examples of “microaggressions“.
- A campus can sensitize students and faculty to the impact that certain words may have as part of an effort to create a respectful work and learning environment.
- A campus can ensure that all student organizations, as a condition for recognition and receipt of funding, be open to all students and can impose sanctions on student organizations for conduct if it is not protected by the principles of freedom of speech.
- The campus cannot deny recognition to a student organization or impose sanctions against it for the views or ideas expressed by the organization, its members or its speakers.
- Colleges and universities can punish speech over the Internet and social media that otherwise is not protected such as true threats and harassment or speech inconsistent with professional standards.
- Colleges and universities can’t punish speech over the Internet on the grounds that it's offensive.
- A campus should expect university administrators to speak out against especially egregious speech acts and, most important, encourage the university community to make its own decisions about what speech acts deserve praise or condemnation.
- A campus should not expect the university administrators to comment on or condemn every campus speech act that some person finds offensive.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience — the essential qualities of liberty.
The Chicago Principles, created in 2014 at the University of Chicago, is one of the pillars of university free speech.