The Supreme Court has had a thing or two to say about the unconstitutionality of public universities retaliating against private entities based on a disagreement with their speech.
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The good news is, we at ADF have the back of students when they do take a stand. If you or someone you know is experiencing discrimination on campus, contact us today.
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Throughout the years of defending its policy, the university did not tell the Democratic club it must be led by a Republican, or the vegetarian club that it must be led by a meat-eater, but it did tell Christian groups that they must allow themselves to be led by atheists.
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A Christian student group trying to form a recognized student organization at University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) recently found out it was not religious. How did it find this out? UNCG officials told it so.
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Last week, the University of Wisconsin paid almost $500,000 to the Alliance Defense Fund for violating the First Amendment rights of Badger Catholic, the Catholic student organization on campus. ADF has litigated a number of cases against the University of Wisconsin over the years challenging the unconstitutional abuses inflicted on students and student groups by its mandatory student fee system.
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By David Hacker
Peter Wood has an interesting article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the AAUP’s efforts to encourage faculty advocacy in the classroom. He writes:
In a series of recent reports beginning in 2007 with Freedom in the Classroom, the AAUP has staked out a position that aggressively expands the zone in which faculty members should be free to enunciate their personal opinions to their students. The AAUP has, in effect, found no appropriate limit on what professors should say or how they say it, other than to draw the line at “dishonest tactics” and outright attempts to “deceive students.”
Faculty members teaching a course on botany are, in the AAUP’s reckoning, free to digress on the perfidy of political leaders; faculty members teaching American literature are free to delve at whatever length they choose into issues of economics, social justice, or the environment. The freedom of faculty members, in this view, extends to “rhetorical intensity.” So faculty members are free to bully, humiliate, and rant—although the report genteelly avoids putting in plain language the various forms of intemperate expression its authors would countenance.
The AAUP is pushing for greater academic freedom in the classroom, according to Mr. Wood, because “any attempt to draw the line between permissible and impermissible forms of advocacy might well be seized as a pretext by those who are eager to silence certain views.”
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The late American philosopher Richard Rorty (d. 2007) in describing his assessment of the role of university professor wrote: "When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization." The re-education imperative is one that he, "like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own."
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It's a good day when the Seventh Circuit hands you a First Amendment win. It's an even better day when Judge Posner writes the opinion. And he did just that today when the Seventh Circuit ruled in Zamecnik v. Indian Prairie School District, that Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois violated the First Amendment rights of two students by prohibiting them from sharing their views opposing homosexual conduct.
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We reported last week that President Obama and his Department of Justice (DOJ) had made the startling claim that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional, and that there is no reasonable legal defense the federal government can offer. Therefore, DOJ will no longer defend DOMA in court (although the federal governement will continue to enforce this law that it believes is unconstitutional - how does that make sense?). Wow!
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In response to an ADF letter, Indiana University-Bloomington announced last week that it removed a ban on religious activities from its student activity fee system.
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A blog dedicated to the reclamation and protection of individual rights at monocultural public universities.
A blog dedicated to the reclamation and protection of individual rights at monocultural public universities.
"Brainstorm; Review; Lives of the Mind" A blog run by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
First Principles is the online journal of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute where college and university faculty and students as well as those interested in ideas can find original content and archival material on American intellectual conservatism.
Place. Limits. Liberty.
Mid-length articles on the politics, the business, and the philosophy of higher education, and how a traditional liberal arts education is faring in contemporary academia.
