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The Washington Metro transit board and Cal Poly are not part of the private sector, but are government entities.

Within the confines of the job, they can indeed censor. When I worked for the State of California, we were given directives at election time that we could NOT have any political banners, buttons, etc. on our person or cubicle walls, since this would be viewed as an endorsement.

They couldn't censor me outside of the workplace but they had to do so to ensure impartiality (the converse of the issue at hand).

"When I worked for the State of California, we were given directives at election time that we could NOT have any political banners, buttons, etc. on our person or cubicle walls, since this would be viewed as an endorsement."

But is it LEGAL to make those rules? Not the fact that it was done...bureaucracy will push to see what it can get away with and if it works they go for more restrictions and so on. And speech is curtailed all the time in the interest of "fairness" or "impartiality" or whatever thin veil they want to use.
But does that make it right or do we just resign ourselves to it?

The difficulty with free speech in the public sector dates back to the spoils system prevalent in 19th Century America. Under the spoils system, a government employee's tenure in a job was dependent upon his willingness to campaign for the party in power or his family and social connections with politicians. The advent of civil service reform in the 1880s and thereafter was a response to the widespread corruption among civil servants, including the police. By requiring written or physical tests and prohibiting campaigning for public office holders, the intent was to create a group of peace officers and civil servants that would impartially enforce the law. No system is perfect and many urban political machines circumvented civil service rules, especially in the area of promotions. However, the goal was and is to separate civil servants from partisan politics. It was not to impose an immoral viewpoint on homosexuality on an individual or restrict support for a conservative speaker and his ideas.

The RINO governor of Maryland and the red diaper doper babies running Cal Poly are merely using their political clout to punish people who hold to traditional or conservative views.