اینترنت

برچسب: unconstitutional

  • ACLU says Cal State Long Beach sound amplification rules ‘unconstitutional’

    ACLU says Cal State Long Beach sound amplification rules ‘unconstitutional’


    A teach-in on Palestine at Cal State Long Beach on May 2, 2024.

    Credit: Courtesy of Ben Huff

    California State University, Long Beach is facing accusations that a policy limiting amplified sound on campus violates free speech rights and has been selectively enforced to single out faculty members who criticized the university. 

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California last Thursday sent a letter to campus leaders on behalf of two faculty members it said received notices warning that they violated the school’s sound amplification policies during a teach-in about Palestine last spring.

    Cal State Long Beach regulations for devices like megaphones and microphones “are unconstitutional as written, and there is good reason to suspect that warnings … may have been issued because of disagreement with the professors’ political speech,” ACLU attorney Jonathan Markovitz wrote.

    Cal State Long Beach spokesperson Jeff Cook said in a statement that the university respects “the perspectives expressed in the letter from the ACLU but (disagrees) with several of the characterizations made. As our review of the letter continues, we also reaffirm that campus policies related to ‘Time, Place and Manner’ are viewpoint-neutral.”

    The confrontation at Cal State Long Beach highlights the potential for backlash as universities around the country place a new emphasis on rules around how, where and when people can assemble on their campuses this fall, a reaction to a wave of pro-Palestinian protests last spring. University officials frame revamped guardrails as promoting the peaceful exchange of ideas in continuation of past practices, but critics argue the restrictions will chill free speech.

    The California State University Chancellor’s Office last month debuted a systemwide time, place and manner policy in response to legislation requiring schools in both the Cal State and University of California systems to notify students of free speech rules on their campuses at the start of the academic year.

    Cal State Chancellor Mildred García additionally notified campus presidents in an Aug. 27 letter that activities like forming encampments and occupying buildings “are also prohibited by law and by systemwide directive.” García’s letter has sparked pushback from the California Faculty Association, which argues the university system is imposing new standards of employee conduct unilaterally, failing to give the faculty union an opportunity to bargain.

    The ACLU letter was sent on behalf of professors Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson and Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, who in May co-wrote an article with four other Cal State Long Beach faculty members condemning the university’s ties to Boeing and other defense contractors. 

    “My understanding is that, while many faculty members used amplified sound while participating in the teach-in that provides the ostensible basis for the warning emails, the only faculty members who received these warnings (the Alimahomed-Wilsons, Araceli Esparza, Steven Osuna, Azza Basarudin) were the co-authors of the article,” Markovitz wrote. “I hope that this is mere coincidence, but the correlation is at least notable.” 

    The letter asks the university to stop enforcing its sound amplification restrictions and repeal them until they can be amended “to comport with constitutional requirements.”

    Looking back to the spring

    Both the university’s current sound amplification policy and the policy in effect last spring require advance permission to use any kind of amplification. University policy also sets a decibel limit and specifies times and places where amplification is permitted.

    The matter discussed in the ACLU letter stems from a May 2 teach-in held at the campus.

    The student-organized demonstration started with a march from the school’s upper campus to its lower campus, where a group of hundreds gathered for a teach-in outside an administration building, the five professors named in the ACLU letter said in a group interview. They recalled that roughly eight to 12 speakers shared remarks using a megaphone or a microphone.

    “The whole time, we had mic and megaphone problems,” Osuna said. “It wasn’t very loud. So that’s the part that’s really funny to me – we all kept on trying to tell people, ‘Can you hear us? Can you hear us?’”

    Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, Esparza and Basarudin shared remarks about why Palestine is a feminist issue, while Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Osuna gave a talk describing the university’s connections to Boeing. The latter presentation became the basis for an opinion piece the five professors and a colleague published on May 20 in the website Mondoweiss, which argued that the university’s close relationship with Boeing makes it complicit in the violence in Gaza.

    The five professors said that on Aug. 19, the first day of the fall term, they each received emails notifying them that they had violated the time, place and manner policy and would risk formal written reprimand or other disciplinary action if they did not comply with it in the future. 

    “They waited all this time to send us this message on the first day of the semester,” Osuna said. “It’s kind of letting us know, ‘We have our eyes on you.’ That’s the feeling.”

    Osuna said that a similar warning email sent to a sixth person was rescinded because there wasn’t evidence to show they had used a microphone.

    A free speech argument

    Markovitz argued in the letter addressed to Associate Vice President Patricia A. Pérez last week that Cal State Long Beach’s amplified sound policy is unconstitutional because regulations affecting speech must be narrowly tailored. 

    While some limits on amplified sound may be legitimate, he wrote, it is “clearly impermissible to require advance permission for any use of amplification anywhere on campus.” He argued that the campus’ volume limitations could be used to prohibit shouting or chanting without amplification, even if that is not the university’s intention. And he said the time limitations are “poorly written and unclear,” making it difficult to decipher when and where amplification is allowed.

    “The policy’s lack of clarity is a serious problem in its own right, because it makes it impossible for members of the University community to know when they might be in violation of the policy, or when they will be denied permission for amplified sound,” Markovitz wrote. “The risk of arbitrary enforcement is especially pronounced because the policy provides no guidelines indicating when the required requests for advance permission will be granted or denied.”

    Markovitz’s letter also expressed concerns that the university has not enforced its sound amplification consistently, but rather is using the policy to discriminate against faculty members based on their political views. 

    “The inference of viewpoint discrimination or retaliation is bolstered by my understanding that faculty have regularly used amplified sound at union rallies without obtaining advance permission, and without receiving warnings of (time, place and manner) violations later on,” Markovitz wrote. “Again, I hope that the apparent inconsistent application of the university’s amplification has been merely an honest mistake, but I am concerned that hope may not be justified.”

    ‘A fabric of our university’

    Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson said she and other faculty who received the emails have used megaphones at previous teach-ins and protests, including an event following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. 

    “Teach-ins have been a fabric of our university,” she said, “and have never been policed in these ways.”

    “Our students see this, too,” Alimahomed-Wilson added. “So what does it mean when all our students are like, ‘Oh, those professors have gotten doxed over this. Now, those professors are getting criminalized over this. They’re getting charged.’”? I think the impact is really chilling.”

    Alimahomed-Wilson and her colleagues said their support for student protesters is an extension of their duties as faculty members: research, teaching and service to students. 

    “We teach our students about justice, about the military-industrial complex, about settler-colonialism, and if we don’t speak out against what is happening right now, we’re not doing our job,” Basarudin said.





    Source link

  • School boards association lawsuit claims provision in California budget deal is unconstitutional

    School boards association lawsuit claims provision in California budget deal is unconstitutional


    Credit: Flickr

    This article was rewritten and reposted on Sept. 27 to clarify that the lawsuit’s aim is to prevent underfunding of Proposition 98 in future years. The earlier version misstated that the lawsuit asserted the current state budget as enacted also violated the funding law.

    Although the 2024-25 state budget shields school districts and community colleges from funding cuts, the California School Boards Association is suing the Newsom administration over a provision that the school boards association claims is unconstitutional.
     
    The change to the Education Code would deny schools money they would be entitled to under some conditions in future years, setting a dangerous precedent, CSBA argued in a lawsuit filed this week.
     
    The school boards association is asking the Superior Court in Sacramento County to invalidate that section in the education budget bill. CSBA argues it violates the letter and spirit of Proposition 98, the formula that determines how much of the General Fund must be allocated to schools and community colleges.
     
    The Department of Finance inserted the little-known statutory wording  into the budget trailer bill in the final days of the legislative session in June, with no discussion or notice.  It was not mentioned in the budget analysis that legislators reviewed before passing the budget.
     
    “CSBA’s defense of voter‐approved Proposition 98 is nonnegotiable, as is the obligation of the state to follow the Constitution that governs it,” CSBA President Albert Gonzalez, a Santa Clara Unified school board member, said in a statement.
     
    On behalf of Newsom, the California Department of Finance refuted CSBA assertions in a series of exchanges with legislative leaders in July. All of its actions were legal, Joe Stephenshaw, director of the Department of Finance, wrote.
     
    The lawsuit would not affect this year’s budget, which took effect July 1. However, the tense negotiations and controversial revenue maneuvers preceding the budget’s passage were very much on the minds of Newsom’s financial advisors when they wrote the statutory change that the school boards association opposes.
     
    It pertains to the unusual challenge that Newsom and the Legislature found themselves in trying to write the 2023-24 budget. Because of the devasting impacts of winter storms and floods, the federal government and the state pushed back the tax collection deadline from April to November 2023. Without having tax receipts in hand, Newsom and the Legislature made a best-guess estimate of what Prop. 98 minimum guarantee would be for 2022-23. As it turned out, the minimum guarantee was $8.8 billion less than what they appropriated.
     
    Rather than cut funding for school districts and community colleges after the 2022-23 fiscal year had ended and money had been spent, Newsom left what he called “an overappropriation” alone. Two of the main formulas to determine the Prop 98 minimum guarantee incorporate what the state spent on schools in the prior year. So, the over-appropriation in 2022-23 would increase the amount that the state owed schools in 2023-24, 2024-25 and beyond. his initial 2024-25 budget in January, Newsom proposed allowing schools to keep the $8.8 billion for 2022-23 but to exclude the money when calculating the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee for 2023-24 and 2024-25.
     
    CSBA and other education groups opposed that move. They said that dropping Prop. 98 below what the Legislature had approved violated the initiative that voters passed in 1988.
     
    In most years, the Legislature’s Prop. 98 appropriation becomes the base amount for the following year, then is adjusted for enrollment growth or decline, inflation, or increases in economic growth per student. That assures that Prop. 98 minimum funding guarantee will grow over time, CSBA said.
     
    Faced with strong opposition from a coalition of school groups, Newsom eventually gave up on lowering the minimum guarantee. But still short of funding to pay for it, Newsom turned to a series of multiyear maneuvers: suspending the minimum guarantee in 2023-24, deferring funding from one year to the next, draining the rainy day fund, and creating a multi-billion dollar debt that the General Fund, not future Prop. 98 revenues, would pay back over several years. All of these tactics were legal.

    Newsom tries again
     
    But Newsom and Finance officials hadn’t given up on the idea of revising the Prop. 98 minimum guarantee downward when tax revenues come up short. They quietly inserted language into the trailer bill to limit the state’s funding vulnerability in the event of another tax filing delay in the future.
     
    It says that when the filing deadline for personal and corporate income taxpayers is pushed back at least two weeks, then the state will revert to the previous year’s minimum guarantee. After the new taxes are collected, the state will recalculate the new Prop. 98 minimum and determine the difference between the original and revised Prop. 98 minimum. The “excess” appropriation won’t be able to raise the Prop. 98 minimum that year and for subsequent years, the statute says.  
     
    CSBA criticized this “unlawful provision” for “artificially lowering the baseline upon which future years’ school funding is established.” The lawsuit argues that voters passed it to assure a “stable and predictable source of funding that is not subject to political influence or manipulation.”  

    “When the Newsom administration proposed a budget maneuver in January to exclude some school funding from the Prop 98 formulas, education groups opposed it because it was unconstitutional. The budget language passed this summer to allow a similar manipulation of the guarantee in the future would be similarly unconstitutional,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal advisor for the nonprofit Children Now and an advisor on the lawsuit.
     
    Delays in the tax deadline as occurred in 2022 and laid out in the provision will presumably be rare, but CSBA said the integrity of Prop. 98 must be preserved.
     
    The Legislature has no authority to amend the wording of Prop. 98 – only voters can do that, CSBA argued.
     





    Source link