University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student and Turning Point USA (TPUSA) chapter president Kyler Kayanek told Breitbart News that while attempting to recruit TPUSA members on campus, school officials approached his group and told them that they were not allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights in the public square of the university. Kayanek spoke to SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow in a Wednesday interview for the show’s TPUSA campus report.
“We hadn’t even been set up five minutes and a police officer came with an administrator, said Kayanek. “We had a sign out that had a few guns on it as we are supporters of the Second Amendment, and the first thing they asked us was if we were armed.”
The student added that the two had left shortly after that, but that “not even 45 minutes later, another administrator came, and he just said we were gonna have to leave.”
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“He said it was against university policy for us to be there, because we didn’t make a reservation,” added Kayanek.
The student continued:
As the president of Turning Point USA, I’ve read over the student handbook, and it specifically says we have the right to peacefully assemble, but apparantly if that goes against the university policy of reserving a space on a public campus, then it’s in violation.
“This is a public university, you’re not on private property, you’re not trespassing, you’re a student of the university,” noted Marlow. “This is an infringement on free speech. This is also an infringement on free assembly from my vantage point.”
“Apparently everyone has the right to freely assemble unless it’s against university policy,” said Kayanek. “They let us move to a different area of campus — but you know, we couldn’t be there right at the center of campus.”
Universities are known to have “free speech zones,” which refers to when university administrators designate a specific area on a college campus for one to exercise their First Amendment rights, which in turn, seems to imply the false narrative that public property in the United States of America is not in itself a “free speech zone.”
“We’re gonna try to fight this, we’re gonna try to assemble more, and we’re gonna try to gather as many people as we can on campus to help fight this very biased and one-sided opinion,” Kayanek affirmed.
“I’m hoping to really grow the club and try to be very proactive on campus,” the student added of his future plans with TPUSA on campus. “We’re hoping to have an NRA event on campus. We’re hoping to bring speakers. We’re hoping to really open up dialogue.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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