Amid government shutdown lead-up, this story seems to have slipped beneath the radar. But it’s well worth noting.

The University of California, Berkeley was once a haven of liberty.

How far the mighty have fallen.

The birthplace of the Free Speech Movement appears to have moved a few anatomical inches back, gifting the world the excrement of fascistic wokeness. But finally, they’ve had to pay for it.

$70,000, to be exact.

In April of 2017, Berkeley’s College Republicans and Young America’s Foundation sued the school after its last-minute cancellation of a speech by Ann Coulter under the guise of “security concerns.” The university had also imposed new “curfew and venue restrictions” on the organizations’ speakers.

Hence, under a November 30th settlement agreement, UC Berkeley agreed to pay the plaintiffs 70 Big Ones in attorneys fees.

Furthermore, as reported by The College Fix at the time:

[UCB] has promised to consider changes to its “major events” policy that spell out “permissible criteria” for evaluating event requests by groups such as the CRs. The proposed changes also specify which officials are authorized to make decisions.

The settlement includes a “security fee schedule” that UC-Berkeley promised not to increase for at least three years, except to account for “salary and benefit increases” for campus police.

YAF released a press release with the subject line “YAF Wins Landmark Free Speech Lawsuit”:

“[T]he University finally felt the heat and saw the light of their unconstitutional censorship. … [Free speech had been] long squelched by Berkeley’s scheming administrators who weaponized flawed policies to target conservatives.”

The statement outlined some of the points of change:

“No longer can UC Berkeley place a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech. No longer can UC Berkeley ban advertisements for Young America’s Foundation-sponsored campus lectures. And no longer can UC Berkeley relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations.”

YAF’s Spencer Brown discussed the victory with The Daily Caller:

“While we regret the time, effort and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”

Will the school keep the agreement? Berkeley College Republicans President Matt Ronnau told TDC that, if they don’t, the CR’s will give them a little bit of What For:

“I cannot say whether or not the [sic] University will stick to the agreement of this settlement in the future, but I believe that for their sake, they will certainly want to. Over the course of the past year and a half we have shown that we can fight the University of California — and win. If UC Berkeley reverts back to their old tactics, I know that there is a lawyer ready to jump at the case and take Cal to court.”

This is fantastic news. In the arena of freedom of expression and diversity of thought, UCB has — for quite a while now — periodically made the country’s secondary educational system look like a Land of Goobs (See some horrific collegiate embarrassment here). Hopefully, the school won’t revert to its old ways, and students will find themselves in an environment that teaches them, not so much what to think, but how to think.

-Alex

Relevant RedState links in this article: here.

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