FIRE's video: Censorship can be costly to colleges

Like FIRE on Facebook: http://facebook.com/TheFIREorg Follow FIRE on Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheFIREorg Subscribe for email updates: https://www.thefire.org/news-and-media/subscribe-to-fires-updates/ If speech ain’t free, it’ll cost taxpayers and students a pretty penny. The University of California San Diego failed in their attempt to shut down a satirical student-run publication and it resulted in over $800,000 in legal fees. At the center of the legal dispute was a November 2015 article from The Koala, an abrasive, off-color student newspaper at UCSD. The article, entitled “UCSD Unveils New Dangerous Space on Campus,” mocked the idea that students needed a safe space on campus by suggesting that the university should equally respect certain students’ needs to have “dangerous space.” This piece, from a publication that had long riled the campus, was the last straw for administrators, who asked their attorneys to look into “creative” solutions to drive The Koala into extinction. And what was the plan? Instead of cutting the funding for this one newspaper, the university pressured the student government to cut the funding to all student newspapers. The Koala and UCSD settled the case in September 2020, with the university paying the newspaper $12,000 and $150,000 more to cover attorneys’ fees. According to a public records request by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the University of California had spent an additional $662,317 on its own lawyers. By contrast, the funding originally allocated for The Koala was only $452.80.