Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in November 2021 three students at Clovis Community College who were also members of the college club for Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) got permission to put up posters on campus showing in detail the historic and documented horrors of communist rule worldwide. The picture to the right shows one such poster.

Soon thereafter some people supposedly complained that the posters made them “uncomfortable.” Despite the fact that everything in the posters is factually true, the then college president Lori Bennett ordered the posters torn down, claiming she did it because they weren’t specifically a “club announcement.

In August 2022 the students sued [pdf] with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), noting that Bennett’s policy was not only inconsistent and arbitrarily, it was mostly used to block conservative political statements college administrators did not like.

The students have now won a settlement in court.

The State Center Community College District agreed to pay $330,000, adopt a new posting policy and “provide annual documented First Amendment training to all managers,” the first of which in December must be done by “qualified outside counsel,” the settlement agreement says.

It must show the training materials to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represents the students and Young Americans for Freedom chapter at Clovis Community College who sued the school and district, and “certify to FIRE the number of people that attended” the 2024 and 2025 trainings.

The payment is broken down into $250,000 in attorney’s fees for FIRE and $20,000 each for individual plaintiffs – Daniel and Alejandro Flores, Juliette Colunga and the YAF chapter.

The original suit did not sue the college or the district, but instead targeted directly President Bennett, Vice President of Student Services Marco De La Garza, Dean of Student Services Gurdeep Sihota Hebert, and Senior Student Services Program Specialist Patrick Stumpf for their actions to squelch the first amendment rights of these students. Apparently the college district stepped in and offered this settlement in order to protect its employees from direct personal liability, and the students, YAF, and FIRE agreed.

Though most of these college administrators appear to have personally gotten away with their thugish actions, Bennett was forced to retire in April 2022, and her illegal poster policy was shut down soon thereafter, right after the lawsuit was filed. The settlement will now force those still employed by the college to undergo the proper training on the Bill of Rights and what it means to be an American that you would expect every person working at a college would have learned in elementary school.