Dressed in a fluorescent yellow hoodie with the word “OBEY” printed in large font across the back, the “preacher” spewed words at Wichita State students.

“God hates fags,” he said.

“Are you a homosexual?”

“Are you a drunkard?”

“You’re not my brother, and you’re not my sister.”

And students engaged him.

“We refuse to listen to you,” graduate student Jessica Tibbott replied.

The man — who would not identify himself — was on campus for three consecutive days starting April 8 and drew crowds of at least 50 students in front of the Grace Memorial Chapel each day. University police officers stood on standby, but no one was arrested.

Some of the students said they were offended by his speech, including one who filed a report to university police, according to the police blotter.

“He was calling people whores,” freshman Hannah McGrath said. “He said the whole volleyball team was homosexual … That’s sexual harassment, and he’s not being held accountable.”

Communication law professor Patricia Dooley said she heard of the “preacher’s” choice of words through the grapevine, but didn’t get to witness it firsthand.

“That could be what would be called fighting words,” Dooley said of the speech, “and that’s not protected speech.”

Fighting words are defined as the “lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting,” as established by the 1942 case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. According to the courts at the time, fighting words “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”

“It sounds to me that it got pretty awful,” Dooley said of the man’s demonstrations, “and I would probably be upset if I heard it.”

But being “upset” about speech is another thing, Dooley said.

“I always tell people the more speech, the better,” she said. “Even if you don’t like it, it gets you to think, gets the discussion going. Maybe your mind will be changed. If you limit speech that people don’t like … then that’s a bad thing.”

The line between protected and unprotected speech is a gray area, Dooley said.

“Free speech is a challenging issue, but basically we don’t step in until laws are broken,” Chief of University Police Sara Morris said in an emailed statement. “… Just because someone doesn’t like what is being said is not grounds for the police to step in and arrest someone or force them to leave.”

Like in the “preacher” case two weeks ago, Morris said many speakers will try to get a gathering crowd to interact with them by using inflammatory comments to get an exchange going.

“What people in the crowd need to remember is that the speaker generally knows the boundaries,” Morris said, “and unfortunately, it oftentimes ends up being the onlooker who gets so upset that they say or do something that ends up costing them.”

According to university policies 11.12 and 11.13 (one is for university groups and one for non-university groups), WSU does not grant speech that “limits, interferes with or otherwise disrupts the normal activities” of the university, according to time, place and manner regulations. Almost every university follows similar guidelines, Dooley said.

For example, First Amendment speech cannot take place inside a campus building, according to the university policy. For organized speech of more than 30 individuals, demonstrators cannot be on campus the same day as previously scheduled university events or activities.

On the popular anonymous social network application Yik Yak, many on campus worried that visiting high school juniors would be turned away by the “preacher” when they were on campus for Junior Day on April 10.

Some of the visiting juniors left remarks on their evaluation forms regarding the “preacher,” said Mary Ann Hollander, recruitment events coordinator for WSU’s Office of Admissions.

“Most people thought it was pretty funny and entertaining,” Hollander said. “I didn’t hear any bad feedback, and people understand that this kind of stuff happens on college campuses.”

Dooley said the logistical management on WSU’s behalf is important to carry out the mission of the university — to educate.

“That still leaves a lot of room for content that might not be libelous, it might not be obscene, it might not cause a riot, but it’s so obnoxious that people don’t appreciate it very much.”