Ban on U of Rhode Island College Republicans nixed

Ban on U of Rhode Island College Republicans nixed

The University of Rhode Island (URI) Student Senate has dumped its plan to ban the College Republicans for announcing a satirical $100 scholarship for white, heterosexual American males. A Student Senate committee had voted to deny recognition to the conservative student group over its refusal to apologize for advertising the fake scholarship.

However, after facing intense public pressure on and off campus, the executive committee of the URI Student Senate has voted to overturn the decision to ban the College Republicans. Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), says university president Robert Carothers understood that making people apologize for something they are not sorry for is "a blatant violation of the Constitution."

"As we often say, as bad as it is to tell people what they can't say, it's even worse to tell them what they must say," Lukianoff notes. "So, thankfully -- and I wish more presidents were like this -- we had the URI president on our side," he says.

"Add that to public pressure, add that to a letter-writing campaign on the part of students, add that to just the manifest fact that they were violating the law, and there was just so long that the Student Senate could keep going in this direction," the FIRE spokesman asserts. In this case, he says, the campus governing body was "trying to claim that they are an independent corporation, so therefore they are not bound by the First Amendment or bound by the Bill of Rights in general."

This is quite a novel claim, Lukianoff contends. "We haven't seen this before," he says, "and, given the utter failure of the Student Senate to succeed on this claim, hopefully it's an argument we will not be seeing again anytime soon."

The College Republicans say they viewed the fake scholarships for "white, heterosexual American males" as a way to protest discriminatory scholarships awarded to female minority students. Lukianoff says FIRE has strongly criticized attempts to force the conservative student group into an apology.