The lawsuit was brought by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) attorney on behalf of three students at Clovis Community College. The students are members of the school’s chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom. They allege that they had received approval to post anti-communist and anti-socialist flyers on bulletin boards inside campus buildings last November. However, Clovis President Dr. Lori Bennett allegedly ordered the flyers taken down.
The defendants in the suit are Clovis Community College President Lori Bennett, Vice President of Student Services Marco De La Garza, Dean of Student Services Gurdeep Sihota Hebert and Senior Student Services Program Specialist Patrick Stumpf.
The college insists that it reserves the right to remove flyers over “inappropriate or [offensive] language or themes.” The lack of any definition for those vague terms would weigh heavily with the court in granting the preliminary injunction.
FIRE produced emails showing that a college administrator offered to “gladly take down” the flyers after “several people” said that they were “very uncomfortable” with the flyers, including a person who allegedly threatened a “harassment claim” if the posters were not taken down.
The lawsuit includes a claim that, in December 2021, the students were denied permission by the dean of student services to post pro-life flyers on bulletin boards inside campus buildings. They were told they could instead post them on a “free speech kiosk,” which is described as “a small box covered in rotting wood planks… at the edge of a walkway students virtually never use because it does not lead to any building entrances or parking lots.”
Under the settlement agreement, Clovis’s community college district will:
- Adopt a new posting policy that will protect the First Amendment rights of all student groups across the district.
- Hold annual First Amendment training sessions for all district administrators and certify in writing who attended and what training materials were used in 2024 and 2025.
- Pay the students $20,000 in damages each, plus $250,000 in attorneys’ fees, for a total of $330,000.
Unfortunately, as we have seen repeatedly, school officials deny free speech to students and faculty but are rarely held accountable. To the contrary, these cases (while expensive for taxpayers and donors) are personally beneficial for these officials.
Universities and colleges routinely lose in courts over these denials but there is still no evidence of a deterrent effect on actual conduct.
Instead, these settlements and verdicts are treated as a cost of doing business for anti-free speech administrators.