WE NEED TO START ADDING ZEROES TO THESE PAYOUTS: Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville has agreed to pay $10,000 to settle a First Amendment lawsuit filed by the school’s College Republicans chapter.

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville has settled a lawsuit with the College Republicans, agreeing to pay the group’s attorney fees and revise its unconstitutional speech policies.

According to NBC affiliate KSDK, the university will pay $10,000 for attorney fees and has already eliminated its speech zone after the College Republicans, with help from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), challenged the constitutionality of the school’s free speech policy in October. . . .

According to the lawsuit, the university restricted its free speech zone to “less than 0.0013% of the entire SIUE campus” and did not “provide any alternative locations for student speech outside the Speech Zone.”

“Defendants’ Speech Policies and their practice of limiting students’ and student organizations’ expressive activities to a single Speech Zone at SIUE facially violates the First Amendment because it prohibits students and student organizations from engaging in speech in public areas of the campus other than the limited area of the Speech Zone,” the lawsuit argued.

As previously reported by Campus Reform, conservative students at the university were confronted in September by a campus police officer, who told them that their free speech ball was “scaring” classmates and that they had failed to secure the proper permission to hold the demonstration.

When the students objected that they were simply exercising their First Amendment right to express themselves in a public place, the officer rejected their contention, arguing that the state university campus is not public.

This sort of thing is so clearly wrong, it shouldn’t even get qualified immunity.