Conservative students file suit against U.C. Berkeley over Coulter event

BERKELEY — Charging that the University of California has attempted to “restrict conservative free speech’’ regarding author Ann Coulter’s appearance on campus, two Berkeley student groups filed suit Monday in federal court to challenge the university’s efforts to reschedule her April 27 event.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California on behalf of two organizations — the national Young America’s Foundation and the UC Berkeley College Republicans — names UC President Janet Napolitano and university officials, including the head of the campus police department, as defendants.

San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee member who is representing the student groups, said in an interview that progressive leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, and Rep. Keith Ellison have all spoken up for the right of the student groups in Berkeley, the “birthplace of the Free Speech Movement” to schedule Coulter’s address.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “The students have a right to hear different voices on campus. They have a right to invite speakers we have a right to hear.”

Her suit maintains that UC Berkeley officials “freely admit that they have permitted the demands of a faceless, rabid, off-campus mob to dictate what speech is permitted the center of campus during prime time — and which speech may be marginalized, burdened, and regulated out of its very existence by this unlawful heckler’s veto.”

The controversy over Coulter’s appearance erupted when the two groups announced plans for an April 27 speech by Coulter, a best-selling conservative author.

University officials, citing recent politically-generated violence on campus and in the city, at first said they had received information that suggested Coulter’s personal safety would be at risk and canceled the event. Then they rescheduled the event for May 2 — prompting both the conservative groups and Coulter herself to balk, contending that the new date, during the university’s “dead week,’’ was unacceptable.

University officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dhillon’s filing charges that at one of California’s leading public universities, UC Berkeley officials have consistently aimed “to restrict and stifle the speech of conservative students whose voices fall beyond the campus political orthodoxy.”

“Though UC Berkeley promises its students an environment that promotes free debate and the free exchange of ideas,” the lawsuit argues, it has “breached the promise” simply because that “expression may anger or offend students, UC Berkeley administrators, and/or community members who do not share Plantiffs’ viewpoints.”

Coulter, on Twitter, announced “our lawsuit” Monday, but Dhillon told POLITICO that she does not represent the author — only the two student groups seeking to schedule her talk.