Ohio University on Monday signed a settlement pact in which it agrees to revise several policies in the Student Code of Conduct as the end result of a First Amendment lawsuit from an OU student challenging that policy.

Senior Isaac Smith worked in coordination with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a national nonprofit that advocates free speech in colleges, to sue OU last July as a part of a national freedom of speech litigation campaign.

Smith and FIRE charged in that lawsuit that university officials illegally and unconstitutionally told students at the Campus Involvement Fair in August 2013 to stop wearing a T-shirt with the slogan, "We Get You Off for Free," claiming it was offensive. The shirt used the phrase to advertise Students Defending Students, a campus organization that provides legal support for students. Smith belongs to the group.

Smith and his attorneys were awarded $32,000 by OU as a result of the settlement, $6,000 of which goes to Smith directly.

[A]cross the nation, polls show that while people may favor reducing government spending in the abstract, when it comes to the actual programs that might be affected, they prioritize public services over deficit reduction. In a recently released survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans said that the government should focus on reducing the deficit. Yet when asked about specific programs, a majority of respondents, including Republicans, rejected spending decreases for programs such as education, Social Security, agriculture and roads and bridges. Our challenge is turning the voices that we don’t hear regularly in the media into a vocal majority.

When we … set up the debate as one of saving money versus spending money, we lose. Drawing from the Oregon example, we must approach the discussion in a different way, creating a conversation about what is really worth paying for.

the state legislature… enacted measures that would raise taxes on corporations and households earning more than $250,000 per year in order to preserve critical public services. In January 2010, after opponents forced a public referendum on the tax measures, proponents waged a resolute and ultimately successful campaign that allowed lawmakers to keep essential public services off of the chopping block.

Ohio University (OU) President Roderick McDavis, who sits on the presidents’ council as a part of the IUC [Inter-University Council], supported the original version of the bill that would have banned collective bargaining for all public employees, and does not oppose it in its current form, according to his Chief of Staff, Becky Watts. …

Watts said that President McDavis was “not opposed to SB-5” because it would give the university “greater flexibility” in addressing its budget crisis. …

Watts said that McDavis believes that SB-5 would maintain the status quo at OU.

“SB-5 would support a continuation of the shared governance model [between employee groups and student senate] that we have in place at Ohio University,” she said. “Shared governance is an important aspect of the culture of Ohio University.”

“I was raised in a union family and, as president and provost, have found our union leadership to be of the highest quality. I appreciate all they have brought to us, and I believe we are a stronger institution because of their dedicated commitment to their membership.”

“I don’t think it’s the place of a college president to become at all involved in a lobbying effort of this kind, one that his employees all understand as an attack on their work conditions and their wages,” she said.

White was most troubled by mixed messages coming from the OU administration.

“We have been hearing from the president and the provost about the importance of us all pulling together across the university community to deal with this fiscal crisis,” she said. “To hear that they are actually offering up the salaries and jobs of workers and faculty — to so clearly manage this cut on our backs and not theirs — suggests to me that the message that we all need to pull together is less than genuine.”