A California state university has this week agreed to revise its policies and pay more than $240,000 in fees after a federal court last summer found that the university had discriminated against a student pro-life group and had used mandatory student fees to fund only university-favored views.
In 2017, legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit on behalf of the pro-life student group Students for Life, after California State University–San Marcos denied the group access to funding paid for by mandatory student fees that should have been available to all student groups.
According to ADF, CSU-San Marcos has more than 100 student groups but has been discriminatory in distributing funding to those groups. In the 2016-2017 academic year, the university gave the Gender Equity Center and the LGBQTA Pride Center a combined total of $296,498, or 57 times what the other student groups were granted, which was less than $6,000.
The issue came to light in the 2016-207 school year when Students for Life was denied $500 to fund a visiting pro-life speaker, University of North Carolina–Wilmington Professor Mike Adams, who was to give a talk on “Abortion and Human Equality.” The group members had paid the same mandatory student activity fees required of all students.
In 2019, a California district court ruled against CSU-San Marcos’ “back room deliberations” that determined how to distribute student group funds, and directed the university to reach an agreement with Students for Life about amendments to their policies. These changes, which will be applied to all 23 schools in the California State University system, will be made so that the policies comply with the state constitution’s viewpoint-neutrality requirement for universities.
Full story at Catholic News Agency
Thank God for groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and Students for Life. This is good news. Public universities should be places of free exchange of various ideas and viewpoints. I did my undergraduate degree at San Jose State in the late 1970’s. It was a rather wild, “free-wheeling” time with many interesting verbal exchanges around the Student Union. Yet, pro-life and Christian viewpoints were not suppressed. The truth can stand on its own in a free marketplace of ideas. We need to remember our Catholic forebearers and get out of our parishes and into the public square. I’m glad this applies to all the Cal State schools. Next, it needs to apply to the UC schools, like Cal Berkeley, once called “the home of free speech,” but now only politically correct speech is permitted (with threats of violence against those who disagree).
What about past funding discrimination? Claw back funds from other groups to equal levels for all.