"Cheney's coming here is a contradiction of what we're trying to do," he said. "We represent an institution of peace, he represents an institution of war ... an institution of deception and outright lies." he said.

Public universities are allowed to impose only reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. But they must be narrowly tailored and related to a compelling state interest.

Free speech zones have been instituted at many public schools, as administrators claim in the name of "tolerance" that allowing unrestricted speech on campus would disrupt their educative mission.

Such zones are unconstitutional because it is simply unreasonable to confine speech to a few select places on public universities. When challenged over free speech zones, universities have uniformly backed down, wisely choosing not to  pursue their illegal speech zones in the courts.

However, when it comes to private institutions, the First Amendment does not apply. The First Amendment operates as a restriction on government, not on private individuals. Because students at private universities cannot claim a First Amendment protection against their schools, they must rely on the protections of contract law or other state protections.

Simply put, universities that hold themselves out to students as open, enlightened, tolerant, or in any other way supportive of free speech, can be contractually held to that position. On the other hand, schools that have speech codes in place, or which have indicated to incoming students that they place other restrictions on speech, have put incoming students on notice that will not exercise unrestricted speech on campus. By choosing to attend a school in which speech is restricted despite having knowledge of such, the student may be contractually consenting.

Students at private schools may also rely on state protections, constitutional or statutory. But the familiar cry, "What about free speech?!?" is largely inapposite at private universities like BYU.

Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality
Thursday, August 10, 2006  
by Sara Robinson

Here's the good news. That Great Wall that separates our little reality-based community from The Fantasyland Next Door is not a monolith. Nor are the inmates of that Otherworld necessarily locked in there for all time and eternity. There's evidence -- from scientists, from experience, from history -- that there are cracks in that wall. They are small and subtle, to be sure (that's why nobody's ever noticed them before): at this point, they are mere hairlines, faint traces that are hard to spot without a good flashlight in the hands of someone who knows where to look. But, as someone who's spent much of her life pacing one side or the other of this wall, I am here to tell you: there are places where it fails. People do cross it, and survive to tell the tale. And, rather than continue to wallow in our frustration, it's high time we mapped those cracks, find effective ways to widen them, and eventually exploit them to help both afflicted individuals and our larger culture break through the insanity.

High-SDO people are characterized by four core traits: they are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to expanding their own personal power, and amoral. These are usually accompanied by other unsavory traits, many of which render them patently unsuitable for leadership roles in a democracy: