678
Opinion of the Court
as the restrictions are reasonable and [are] not an effort to suppress expression merely because public officials oppose the speaker's view." Cornelius, supra, at 800 (internal quotation marks omitted).
In summary, traditional public fora are open for expressive activity regardless of the government's intent. The objective characteristics of these properties require the government to accommodate private speakers. The government is free to open additional properties for expressive use by the general public or by a particular class of speakers, thereby creating designated public fora. Where the property is not a traditional public forum and the government has not chosen to create a designated public forum, the property is either a nonpublic forum or not a forum at all.
B
The parties agree the AETC debate was not a traditional public forum. The Court has rejected the view that traditional public forum status extends beyond its historic confines, see ISKCON, 505 U. S., at 680-681; and even had a more expansive conception of traditional public fora been adopted, see, e. g., id., at 698-699 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgments), the almost unfettered access of a traditional public forum would be incompatible with the programming dictates a television broadcaster must follow. See supra, at 673-675. The issue, then, is whether the debate was a designated public forum or a nonpublic forum.
Under our precedents, the AETC debate was not a designated public forum. To create a forum of this type, the government must intend to make the property "generally available," Widmar v. Vincent, 454 U. S. 263, 264 (1981), to a class of speakers. Accord, Cornelius, supra, at 802. In Widmar, for example, a state university created a public forum for registered student groups by implementing a policy that expressly made its meeting facilities "generally open" to such groups. 454 U. S., at 267; accord, Perry, supra, at 45 (desig-
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