On May 20, Citrus College student Chris Stevens became the plaintiff in a FIRE-orchestrated lawsuit against the school for its unconstitutional free speech zones. Citrus College administrators and faculty defended the zones, employing a peculiarly lemming-like logic to argue that since other schools have them, they must be okay. But "everyone else is doing it" is hardly a viable legal defense, and if the Citrus College faculty and administrators don't know it, the Board of Trustees does. On Thursday, the Board eliminated Citrus College's free speech zones, striking from the school's regulations the two policies that led to the suit. "We wanted to err on the side of caution," the Board president told a reporter for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. It would have been nicer if he had said, "We wanted to err on the side of freedom," but that's a minor, if revealing, point.

Stevens filed the suit with FIRE's assistance after he was twice refused permission to hold rallies on campus (the first time he was refused, he sought permission to hold a pro-America rally; the second time he was refused, he wanted to protest Governor Davis' education budget). On both occasions, he was told he would have to confine himself to one of the school's three very small and out of the way free speech zones, and that he would be arrested and expelled if he did not.

The San Gabriel Valley Tribune notes that "In perhaps an ironic twist, the board barred Stevens from speaking during the public hearing portion of the meeting." This was, perhaps, also a fortuitous twist. Stevens was not so barred from expressing himself on Critical Mass, where he posted two comments a couple of weeks ago. Those comments were not only self-discrediting in their grammatical insufficiency (a collegiate poster boy for free speech ought to be able to articulate his cause clearly), but also led some readers to wonder about the striking contrast between the eloquent Stevens quoted on FIRE's web site and the functionally illiterate Stevens who spoke for himself on Critical Mass. As one reader wrote in a comment to this post,

Here is Stevens as represented on FIRE's website (thefire.org):

"Citrus College believes that it may take away rights that this country has guaranteed for over two hundred years," said Chris Stevens. "On a college campus, speech should provoke more speech--not threats of punishment, expulsion, or arrest. Citrus College may continue to threaten me, but I will defend my constitutional rights."

I now doubt whether Stevens ever actually spoke or wrote those eloquent words. Far from being a smooth-spoken, principled defender of liberty and justice, the real Stevens [and thank you, Erin for verifying that this really *is* Stevens] is an illiterate, morally confused young man with a penchant for adolescent bravado. I support the principles motivating this lawsuit, but I can't endorse FIRE's journalistic ethics here.

I would love to be wrong about that, and I suppose it is just possible that Stevens experienced a flash of semantic inspiration at precisely the moment that he uttered the sentences FIRE quotes. But I am left chewing on the more likely, more unpleasant, more brutally ironic possibility: that this is a free speech case where the plaintiff cannot speak freely without damaging his case; where he can only pass as a credible exemplar of unfairly muzzled student expression if he is himself muzzled and others speak for him; and where, in failing fully to recognize this, and in continuing, at least for a time, to speak his mind, the plaintiff has inadvertently undermined the credibility of the organization that is championing him by making it possible for readers to compare his unexpurgated error-ridden prose to the polished cadences supplied for him by his defenders.

Again, I'd love to be disabused of my niggling discomfort with this situation, and I know there are many Critical Mass readers who are also stolid FIRE supporters who feel the same. For now, though, the comment I quoted above expresses an unanswered discomfort that runs all the deeper for the broad context of contemporary journalistic slipperiness in which it festers. In the moment of Jayson Blair's plagiarisms, Maureen Dowd's citational fabrications, and The Guardian's politically convenient failure to fact-check, people are justifiably jumpy about indications that trusted media are misleading them. I'm grieved that there should ever be such a question about FIRE, whose work I value, admire, and believe in more than I can say. But there it is.