Know Your Rights on Georgia Campuses (2024)

Freedom of expression is fundamental to the labor movement. The United Campus Workers of Georgia wants its members to know their rights and stay safe as they exercise their right to speak out and organize on matters of concern, including in support of student protests on campus. As employees we have the right to meet and discuss matters of importance to our community. Faculty, staff, and students are also protected by the First Amendment and by academic freedom. Faculty can speak publicly, as individuals, on matters of public concern, but when speaking should clarify that they are not speaking on behalf of the university.

The landscape for what is protected speech on campus, in the workplace, and in the state of Georgia has changed recently. The 2022 FORUM Act banned campus “free speech zones”, effectively allowing students to speak publicly and protest non-violently in any public area of the campus. Although the bill itself was created by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and sponsored by GOP legislators, it was designed to give a wide latitude to controversial free speech while also disallowing student counter-protests that would interfere with other students’ speech or deny students access to hear other speech events. This portion of the law was included to ban student protests that seek to protest controversial far-right speakers. Provisions of the law that ban the use of loudspeakers to drown out other campus speech or to otherwise harass student protesters could also be legally applied to some of the more aggressive counter-demonstrations against pro-Palestine speakers and Palestine solidarity student protests.

According to this law, universities are allowed to reasonably restrict “time, place and manner” of speech, but the law also stipulates that such restrictions should be “narrowly tailored in service of a significant institutional interest only when such restrictions employ clear, published, content- and viewpoint-neutral criteria, and provide for ample alternative means of expression. Any such restrictions shall allow for members of the campus community to spontaneously and contemporaneously assemble and distribute literature.” Individual campuses have different regulations for “time, place and manner” of speech, and the law requires them to publicize these regulations to the campus community. For example, Kennesaw State does not allow the use of amplified sound at public forum events during finals week. Georgia Tech has implemented a new rule against setting up structures (tents) on campus.

The law also stipulates that universities may not deem speech a “material or substantial disruption…if it is protected under the Georgia Constitution or the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, including, but not limited to, lawful protests in an unrestricted outdoor area of campus (except during times when those areas have been reserved in advance for other events) or minor, brief, or fleeting nonviolent disruptions of events that are isolated and short in duration.”

We understand that students may engage in civil disobedience that they are aware will violate what the university considers appropriate “time, place and manner” for speech. Even in these cases, members of the campus community, and people in general, should have legal protection from the unnecessary use of force during the course of arrest, as well as all other rights of individuals arrested for any criminal charge. Institutional disciplinary procedures also require due process rights that accompany any such proceeding against a student, staff or faculty member. Students, faculty, and/or staff may also consider legally challenging any regulations enacted by campuses that they feel violate the First Amendment or Georgia state laws.

If you feel that you are being retaliated against for participation in protected speech, or are aware of a regulation that you think might be worthy of legal challenge, please contact the UCWGA at ucwga@ucw-cwa.org

UCWGA encourages its members to be safe and take care of each other!