The University of Southern California Free Culture group held an event where students were invited to speak their mind. This event was called the “Free Speech Zone” like the caged areas in which people are allowed to speak freely outside major political party rallies and other corporate-sponsored events around the world.

Students spoke about the environment, politics, art, their peers, their haircuts, what they ate for breakfast — anything that came to mind. Even more students brought sidewalk chalk with which they wrote words and drew pictures within the “Free Speech Zone” boundaries.

Usually these “zones” are well outside any route where the invited guests would be likely to see them and hear their objections.

The USC fined the Free Culture group for posting unauthorized posters ($1/poster) and charged the group an undisclosed amount for removal of sidewalk chalk.

The irony, oh the irony.

The posters read “This is Not A Free Speech Zone” because the Free Culture group was protesting USC’s policy on free expression and dissent which appears to be in opposition to “the development of human beings and society as a whole through the cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit“.