2008 Woodie Awards
The freedom to speak
Guest Column
Charla Dunca, Emily Pendleton
Issue date: 10/16/07 Section: Opinions
In light of Daniel Moore's reporting on the Oct. 4 Turn Up the Vote event, and in addition to the Jason Thomas's letter to the editor, we write this letter for the sake of clarity. We also want to call to attention to the mismanagement of students' rights, once again, by the Office of Campus Activities and Programs and the UNCG police.
S.P.E.A.K. (Students for Progressive Education, Activism and Knowledge) is a new student organization on campus we've started, which works to provide an open forum for persons to gather and have dialogue with each other and professionals about issues and concerns in education, as well as to participate in service activities to benefit local schools.
Recently, S.P.E.A.K. has been at the center of a grant written by UNCG professors that focuses on pre-service teachers and service learning, bringing to UNCG the full award of $10,000 from UNC-CH's SCALE program.
S.P.E.A.K. is also an unaffiliated student organization by member intent. Invited by the College Democrats to table at the Turn Up the Vote event, we arrived with our own table, chairs, and information on current issues in educational policy.
It was soon mandated that S.P.E.A.K. remove all group information because of our unaffiliated status and failure to fill out the correct paperwork to be on the lawn. Confused, we eventually complied, even though we had been invited by the group that filled out the event contract. The politicians who had been invited were also kicked off campus due to their violation of the policy.
We removed all of the posters with "S.P.E.A.K." on them and then transferred the rest to willing hosts at other tables. At that point, the information was just information, much like handouts from political candidates that sat on the tables of other groups. It was then that Lt. Henry Campbell and his attending officer (Greg McCoy and Alfonso Joyner throughout the day) decided to take down the I.D. information of Charla Duncan, and when asked for an explanation he responded, "you know why."
S.P.E.A.K. (Students for Progressive Education, Activism and Knowledge) is a new student organization on campus we've started, which works to provide an open forum for persons to gather and have dialogue with each other and professionals about issues and concerns in education, as well as to participate in service activities to benefit local schools.
Recently, S.P.E.A.K. has been at the center of a grant written by UNCG professors that focuses on pre-service teachers and service learning, bringing to UNCG the full award of $10,000 from UNC-CH's SCALE program.
S.P.E.A.K. is also an unaffiliated student organization by member intent. Invited by the College Democrats to table at the Turn Up the Vote event, we arrived with our own table, chairs, and information on current issues in educational policy.
It was soon mandated that S.P.E.A.K. remove all group information because of our unaffiliated status and failure to fill out the correct paperwork to be on the lawn. Confused, we eventually complied, even though we had been invited by the group that filled out the event contract. The politicians who had been invited were also kicked off campus due to their violation of the policy.
We removed all of the posters with "S.P.E.A.K." on them and then transferred the rest to willing hosts at other tables. At that point, the information was just information, much like handouts from political candidates that sat on the tables of other groups. It was then that Lt. Henry Campbell and his attending officer (Greg McCoy and Alfonso Joyner throughout the day) decided to take down the I.D. information of Charla Duncan, and when asked for an explanation he responded, "you know why."
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