Comment Re:Coporate Influence (Score 3, Informative) 530
Actually, public universities have very little power to restrict student speech on campus. See, for example, Rosenberger v. University of Virginia, where the Supreme Court required the University to fund a Christian magazine on the same basis it funded student-run secular magazines. Just a few years before that happened, the University tried to defund a conservative magazine. The argument was that commenting on the activities of NOW and other liberal organizations was an inappropriate "political" use of student activity funds; no one seemed take into account that the activities being commented on were funded by those same fees. That one didn't go to court, because of a media storm.
The fact that the students are in some sense "using" state-funded resources doesn't really provide a constitutional basis to restrict their private speech. If resource are made available for private student speech, a public university has very little leeway to favor one viewpoint over another--and this includes attempts to exclude entire topics in a supposedly neutral manner. This error has been repeated quite often in this thread, and it's one reason organizations like FIRE are needed: the public is woefully uneducated on this issue. For example, if a public university allows students to hand out flyers on the quad as a general matter, they can't really control the content of those flyers. And if they restrict the flyers to "official" university functions, they have to ensure that the definition of official is precise and hat they don't allow exceptions.