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You don’t think much about doormats unless you’re at HomeGoods, but they serve many purposes — a place to wipe your shoes, a way to distinguish otherwise identical-looking apartments, and a vessel for personal expression, whether serious or funny. 

Graduate student Amelia Roskin-Frazee chose the last of these. Her UC Irvine apartment doormat read, “No Warrant. No Entry.”

For that alone, UC Irvine is now subjecting Roskin-Frazee and other students to disciplinary proceedings, ordering them to remove personalized doormats or face punishment.

“Doesn’t UC Irvine have anything better to do than to censor my doormat?” said Roskin-Frazee. “The university should refocus its energy where it belongs: on educating its students.”

Administrator admits to selective policy enforcement

The dispute dates back to late 2023, when Roskin-Frazee emailed an administrator to express her concerns about a university policy banning “any signage in windows or on doors facing outside that have words on them.” She (rightly) argued the rule could violate students’ expressive rights and raised concerns about censorship — particularly regarding speech about LGBT issues and sexual assault awareness.

In response, the coordinator cited an even broader  that prohibits “[a]ll outward‐facing signs, decorations, and expressions in windows/on doors.” While restricting certain types of signs or flags in windows for fire safety reasons may be reasonable under the First Amendment, this total ban is not narrowly tailored to those specific concerns.

Worse, the coordinator added that the policy is selectively enforced based on content, explaining that the office probably wouldn’t ask someone to remove a holiday snowflake display but that it has asked “people to take down things like Pride flags, country flags, and advertisements for businesses.” 

This is classic content discrimination. 

Back in 2005, Pastor Clyde Reed of Good News Community Church put up a few signs directing people to his Sunday service in Gilbert, Arizona. But the town’s sign code restricted how large signs could be and how long they could stay up depending on what they said. So Reed sued, and 10 years later in the landmark case , the Supreme Court said that if a law treats speech differently based on its content, it’s probably unconstitutional.

Free speech means free speech. You don’t get to play favorites based on what the message says. Reed helped remind the country that the First Amendment isn’t just a suggestion. But apparently, UC Irvine never got the memo.

Students threatened with punishment for doormats

On April 14, 2025, the same administrator notified Roskin-Frazee that her doormat could violate yet another onerous  that says only doormats “without words or images” are allowed — and ordered her to remove it.

It’s hard to imagine this sort of content discrimination serves a compelling university interest, because it’s not about the actual doormat—it’s about the expression on the doormat. If doormats present a risk to safety in the hallways, for instance, by impeding the ability of emergency services to move in the hallway, shouldn’t any doormat pose that kind of risk? Why does the message on the doormat matter?

FIRE wrote to the university on April 21 explaining that the UC Irvine cannot “maintain speech-restrictive policies that it enforces only when staff or administrators disapprove of the content or viewpoint of speech,” and urging it to refrain from punishing or threatening to evict Roskin-Frazee from her apartment because of her doormat.

The university responded to us on April 23, telling us that it was not threatening Roskin-Frazee with eviction. That’s a relief. But our concerns about these policies and their enforcement remain. 

Flawed policies lead to flawed enforcement

FIRE wrote to the university again on May 14, taking issue with its broader policies on displays. As we told the university, it “has discretion to impose restrictions on unprotected speech, such as obscenity or images for which the university holds a copyright. But banning any expressive doormat, regardless of whether the doormats pose any safety concerns or otherwise violate university policy or the law, is not a reasonable time, place, and manner restriction of protected speech.”

Targeting doormats for removal based on their content violates the First Amendment. Period. 

The university’s policies on outward-facing displays are similarly flawed. Why would an outward-facing display in an apartment pose a different safety or fire risk than an inward-facing display? Delineating between displays like signs or posters based on whether or not they’re visible from the outside, as opposed to whether or not they pose fire or safety risks, is a restriction on student expression, plain and simple.  

Chancellor Howard Gillman knows this better than most. After all, he wrote his  on constitutional ideology. This isn’t hard. UC Irvine must reform its policies to align with the First Amendment.