The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is calling on Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts, to end its censorship of the Turning Point USA student group on campus, which took effect after the students distributed stickers criticizing the Chinese Communist Party.
The stickers — which the national Turning Point USA organization created years ago — feature a character from the popular video game Among Us, in which players try to guess who among their fellow participants is an enemy posing as an ally.
The stickers also include the words “China kinda sus,” another reference to the popular. “Sus,” typically used by members of Generation Z, stands for “suspicious” or “suspect.”
“It has a symbol of the Chinese Communist Party in it, which should make it obvious it was referring to the Chinese government and not the Chinese people,” one TPUSA student said of the sticker.
“We were giving out the stickers, and then the next day — the president released a statement calling us racist,” the student added.
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The student went on to say that school administrators suspended the TPUSA group the following day, without talking to the students or asking them to provide any explanation for their material.
In a letter to the “Emerson community,” the College’s interim President William Gilligan wrote, “It has come to my attention that several individuals were distributing stickers.”
The stickers, Gilligan said, “included anti-Chinese messaging that is inconsistent with the College’s values and will not be tolerated on our campus,” adding that “the expression of free ideas cannot and should not violate these standards.”
“At this time in particular, when there has been a rise in anti-Asian sentiment, it is important to denounce all instances of anti-Asian bigotry and hate, and affirm our support and solidarity with the Asian and Asian-American community on campuses and around the world,” he wrote.
The interim president added that Emerson College and its Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct will launch an investigation into the stickers.
“Our vice president is Asian,” the conservative student said of the TPUSA group on campus. “One-third of all of our members were Asian, many of them from China. So it’s very weird for Emerson to call us anti-Asian when we are one of the most welcoming clubs at Emerson.”
Emerson eventually admitted that the sticker was critical of China’s government, not its people. But the college nonetheless still punished the student group for “bias-related behavior,” arguing that the sticker could unintentionally contribute to anti-Asian discrimination, FIRE said.
FIRE told Breitbart News that since the sticker incident, Emerson College has continued to censor the Turning Point USA student group, in violation of its own pledge to uphold students’ free speech rights.
In one example, administrators prevented one of the TPUSA student leaders from putting up flyers around campus responding to an op-ed in the student newspaper that had criticized the conservative student organization.
In October, administrators refused to approve a screening of a documentary about free speech on campus. A third instance in November involved administrators stopping the TPUSA club from posting promotional materials around campus for a screening of the documentary What Is A Woman?
FIRE said that it has filed a complaint with Emerson’s accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE), explaining that these several instances have chilled student expression on campus, in violation of its accreditor’s requirements.
The organization says it hopes this complaint to the NECHE “will finally force Emerson to respect free expression on campus.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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