Free speech v. censorship: regulating free speech on campus is forcing colleges nationwide to walk a legal tightrope in balancing rights of students and protesters.

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How free are campus free speech zones? And who should be allowed to use them?

As more and more colleges around the country create policies establishing specific "free speech zones" on their campuses, the arrests of a small group of abortion protesters is demonstrating both the success and pitfalls of using these techniques.

Organizer Kortney Blythe, of the Riverside, Calif.-based group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust estimates her youthful volunteers visit hundreds of campuses each year around the country.

Most of the time, the group sets up its gruesome poster-sized displays of aborted, hacked-up fetuses, passes out literature, and leaves a few hours later. Occasionally, though, members are arrested for refusing to obey instructions either to leave the campus or to stay within designated zones.

Currently, members of the group are facing criminal misdemeanor charges at several colleges including Cypress and Chaffey colleges in California and Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College in North Carolina.

Blythe says she doesn't know why members of her group are arrested so often. She also says she's been detained at City College of San Francisco and at Columbia College in Sonora, Calif.

"We don't use amplified sound," Blythe says. "There's no loudness. We just have conversations. We don't stand near doors to buildings. It is obvious we were not doing anything disruptive other than the fact that some people might be offended by our topic."

Legally, college campuses are considered to be public forums where free speech activities have traditionally been permitted. Over the years, courts have ruled that college officials may set up reasonable rules to regulate the "time, place and manner" that the free speech can occur, as long as the rules are "content neutral," meaning they apply equally to all sides of issues.

Typically, colleges have different rules for their own student body than for outsiders who want to come in and demonstrate on campus. Many require advance notice of demonstrations, and expect visitors to stay in their assigned spaces.

These so-called "free speech zones" are considered an oxymoron by some.

Nate Kellum, a lawyer with the national Christian-based Alliance Defense Fund, predicts the issue of college free speech zones will eventually be taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Kellum believes free speech zones by their very nature "are suspect because people want to be where they can communicate their message best."

"Courts have said time and me again that the public university is really the marketplace for ideas and the primary place go for knowledge and to learn how to ask questions," Kellum says. "As long as they are not disrupting classes or interfering with the operation of the school, they should have the right to speak and people have the right to disagree."

The anti-abortion group's grisly photos do attract attention and elicit angry responses from some students. Arguments can break out between demonstrators and students who favor abortion rights.

Balancing Rights

Other causes have also attracted national attention.

In Pennsylvania, retired steelworker Bill Neel complained to the ACLU that he was "herded into a remote free speech zone" when he arrived at Community College of Allegheny County to protest the Bush Administration's policies shortly before Vice President Dick Chancy was scheduled to arrive and give a speech. "I could see pro-Bush and pro-Cheney signs visible beyond the line of police," Neel says.

Kellum's organization has also defended the rights of itinerant preachers to spread their messages on campus.

Attorney Michael Declues of Huntington Beach, Calif., recently represented Long Beach City College when it was sued by the abortion group over its free speech policies.

Declues says he believes that the rights of non-students should be" balanced against the rights of students to have their learning environment not be disrupted. There are times when you don't want the Aryan Brotherhood and the Black Student Union to be in the same place at the same time."

Long Beach college officials had the abortion rights protesters arrested when they refused to obey campus rules. As a result, members filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the college, Declues said.

Initially, the trial court judge ruled that the case could proceed to trial. But, later, Declues said, an appellate court agreed with the college that the case should be thrown out, because the college's regulations were reasonable.

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Now, the group is suing Cypress College, another two-year college in California, on similar grounds, stemming from arrests there last year. Most recently, members were arrested at the college again in February, also for refusing to stay within the boundaries of assigned free speech zones.

Last October, eight members including at least one college student were arrested at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College for refusing to leave the campus when ordered to do so. They are facing criminal charges for second-degree trespassing by the Buncombe County District Attorney's Office.

The group called Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust was founded by Jeff White and Cheryl Conrad, both nationally known in the anti-abortion movement. The group is so named because the young activists consider themselves survivors of what could have been a legal abortion.

Group members draw the ire of some by comparing themselves to Nazi death camp survivors. When the college-age volunteers visit high-school campuses, they stay on public areas such as sidewalks or adjacent parks.

At colleges, they like to choose highly visible areas, from which they can hand out literature to passersby. Demonstrators bring digital cameras and camcorders along to tape any abrogation of what they consider their rights. Several videos have been posted on YouYube that purport to show Survivors members being deprived of their rights.

Survivors members also disregard regulations at some colleges that can require them to sign up 10 days in advance of their scheduled demonstration. College officials say they need the advance notice to assign space and keep the campus orderly.

Lawyer Kellum says such advance sign-ups can violate civil rights if they are too far ahead of time.

"What happens if it rains on the day you want to come?" Kellum asked. "Do you then have to sign up and wait another 10 days?"

Legal Rights and Duties

At Chaffey College, in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, campus police chief David Ramirez says protesters were arrested in November for causing a disturbance.

"They were interfering with the other free speech activity taking place that day," Ramirez says.

One protester was found to be secretly audiotaping police officers, so his equipment was confiscated and he was taken off campus and told not to return, Ramirez says. Secret taping is illegal in California.

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"He was very ornery with me," Ramirez says. "He was detained and we found out he had surreptitiously been audio recording. He was advised to stay off campus."

Ramirez says two other demonstrators were charged with disturbing the peace after they went into the campus police station demanding the return of the audio recorder.

"I think a couple of years ago, the founder of that group came up here unannounced and demonstrated," Ramirez says. "He was very reasonable and we had no problems with him."

Criminal cases against the three are proceeding.

Greg Lukianoff, spokesman for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, known as FIRE, in 2005 called free-speech zones an "Orwellian exercise for turning 99 percent of a university's campus into a censorship zone."

The group does not intervene on behalf of off-campus groups, and did not want to comment on the Survivors cases.

In the 2005 case to which Lukianoff was referring, a student at Seminole Community College in Florida had been refused permission to pass out animal-rights brochures near a cafe on campus because, according to a copy of an e-mail distributed by FIRE, an administrator didn't like the group. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and didn't want her to hand out literature near where people were eating.

"To tell students they can only protest or hand out pamphlets in this tiny little area turns the idea of free speech on its head," Lukianoff says of the Seminole example.

Lawyer Declues, representing Cypress, says his client has both the legal right and the duty to regulate where outside protesters can gather.

He dismisses complaints from Survivors organizer Blythe that her group needs to be able to use the public walkways so members can hand out literature about abortion.

"They are permitted to pass out literature--from the free speech area," Declues says. "If people are allowed to wander all over the campus, approaching individuals, engaging people in debate who don't want to be disturbed, that's not fair to those students who don't want to be bothered."

The free speech zones provide access for the demonstrators to the college's student body, without enabling them to "accost individuals who do not want to be confronted," Declues says.

POTENTIAL FOR CONFLICT

The anti-abortion group's grisly photos do attract attention and elicit angry reposes from some students. Arguments can break out between demonstrators and students who favor abortion rights.