MANHATTAN, Kan. -- Kansas State University made headlines in January after a new group called America First Students (AFS) announced its presence the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights reported that K-State’s AFS group is the first of many planned to appear on campuses across the country in an attempt to enforce campus activism in the “groypers” movement. “Groyper” is the term being used to describe the new white nationalist marketing strategy.
“AFS is an independent student organization (ISO), meaning it’s completely independent of operations from the university,” said Kelli Farris, executive director for Center for Student Involvement at K-State.
ISOs are not required to have a faculty staff or adviser, and they don’t have a sponsorship or connection to any university department. They operate on their own, making their own decisions, managing their own finances and are not allowed to use the university’s logo.
Despite this, they are still entitled to the same rights that all student group organizations have due to the First Amendment. Farris said that all groups are closely monitored to ensure that they abide by campus policies.
“Our staff pay really close attention and meet with every student who wants to start a new organization,” she said. “They review the constitutions to make sure there’s nothing hidden and we pay really close attention to that.”
In March 2018, the Kansas Senate voted on the campus free speech protection act. The bill failed to pass; yea (20), nay (20).
The intention of SB340 was to mandate universities to remove designated free speech zones (areas that the University designate for students to protest) and to take away the right for universities to turn down a student organization from sponsoring a controversial speaker.
The bill would have also prohibited universities from requiring student organizations to pay a security fee for sponsoring a speaker.
According to Mark Johnson, journalism and law professor at the University of Kansas, the bill was aimed at KU and K-State. The universities have very similar student group policies.
“They [both] protect free speech and guarantee the right to speak,” said Johnson. “But the one thing they don’t guarantee is an audience sitting there listening.”
Johnson believes students at Kansas universities have the rights they need in order to successfully advocate.
“I don’t think it [the bill] was necessary,” he said. “The bill would have required that universities adopt policies that would be more friendly to everybody speaking. It would have prohibited the universities from determining how much to charge a speaker based on the speakers' points of view, and they would’ve had to rewrite their harassment policies.”
Johnson said if there’s any problem that should be solved, it should be the students who fix it by learning how to express their opposition to people speaking in a healthy way.
“That kind of [unnecessary] harassment shouldn’t have to fall within the protection of the schools rules, and it doesn’t now,” Johnson said.
Johnson and Farris both believe in the spectrum of healthy student organization on the campuses of Kansas universities.
“We have a campus with all sorts of student organizations on it and they get the chance to really learn how to engage with one another,” said Farris. “Every student can find their own little place on campus and it’s not focused on one area or another, it’s inclusive.”
Jasmine Pankratz is a University of Kansas senior from Abbyville, Kan. studying journalism.