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Wow.

The University of Illinois has sparked outrage by telling faculty, staff and graduate students that a 5-year-old state law designed to prevent state workers from campaigning for candidates on state time or with state resources meant they could not express support for candidates or parties through pins, T-shirts or bumper stickers while on campus. Nor could they attend any political rally or event on campus, the administration said.

The governor's Office of Executive Inspector General, which investigates ethical violations, has gone one step further, saying state law meant that university students, not just employees, were prohibited from participating in political rallies on campus--an assertion at odds with the university's interpretation.

On Friday, the state attorney general's office said the ethics law did not apply to students. The office did not answer whether the law prohibited university employees from wearing political buttons while at work, attending political rallies on campus on non-work time or some of the other specific interpretations made by the university.

To challenge the university's interpretation of the law, students, teaching assistants and professors rallied for Barack Obama on the Urbana-Champaign campus Thursday and then reported themselves Friday to the university's ethics office and the governor's Office of Executive Inspector General.

"We don't want to be disciplined," said Dan Colson, an English graduate student and teaching assistant, who along with other faculty, staff and students argue the University of Illinois was unfairly expanding state law and that academic freedom meant campus communities should not be held to the same standards as other state employees. "We want them to refine their stance and assert that students, faculty, graduate students do have the right to express themselves politically on campus when not functioning as employees."

Tom Hardy, a University of Illinois spokesman, said Thursday that the university only wanted to inform its employees of the law and had no intention of enforcing it. The university, he said, would take no action against participants in the pro-Obama rally.