The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors' recent controversial proposal to ban certain groups from speaking on campus was found to be unconstitutional by the state attorney general's office last week.
The Board also called a special April 6 meeting to review two othercontentious resolutions adopted at the March 10 meeting, which prohibited any recognition of race in admissions and hiring and eliminated sexual orientation from the school's non-discrimination clause.
State Solicitor General William H. Hurd, in a letter Wednesday, advised Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger and Rector John G. Rocovich that "the new regulation violates fundamental rights to assembly and speech as protected by the First Amendment."
The March 10 resolution unanimously passed by 11 Board members prohibited groups that "advocate or have participated in illegal acts of domestic violence and/or terrorism" from speaking on campus.
The resolution was contingent on an approval from the state Attorney General's office.
Virginia Tech spokesperson Larry Hincker said the resolution was authored by one Board member in response to the activities of the environmental group Earth First on the Blacksburg campus.
Earth First is reported previously to have used radical tactics, though it is now a non-violent group. The group is still vehemently vilified by the timber and logging industry, Hincker said.
The resolution also mandated that all groups wishing to hold meetings seek the university president's approval 30 days in advance and gave the president "final decision-making power to determine who can meet on university property."
In a statement addressed to the university community, Steger wrote that, because the proposed policy was not upheld, "We will proceed with the process that has been in place" and lauded freedom of speech as one of the "most precious of our freedoms" and the "cornerstone of scholarship."
The Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville-based civil liberties organization, was one of the legal groups that opposed what they considered a "restrictive resolution."
The group contended the Board overstepped its authority in granting the president "standardless discretion" to approve or deny groups the right to assemble. In a letter to Kilgore, the group implored his office to condemn the resolution as "invalid and unenforceable."
Institute president John Whitehead said, if enforced, the resolution would have elevated the school's president into the position of a "semi-dictator."
"What it was saying was everything must go through [the president]
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