In my recent post, Student Fee Flop, a student at the University of Pittsburgh raised an excellent point that I thought deserved further discussion. Basically, the student said that the Student Government Board (SGB)—not the University—was in error when the SGB refused to allocate student activity fee funds to Students for Life because of the campus group’s pro-life viewpoint. But even though the SGB allocates the student activity fees, the University itself violated the Constitution. How is this so?

When it comes to student activity fees, public universities engage in a constitutional “bargain,” so to speak. A university wishing to impose a mandatory student activity fee to fund student speech must affirmatively ensure that those fees are allocated in a viewpoint-neutral manner, regardless of who does the allocating. A university that desires to fund only certain student viewpoints must relinquish the mandatory nature of the student activity fee. Pitt has chosen the former route, and so it has elected to shoulder the constitutional duty to ensure that the fees are distributed without regard for the views of the students requesting such funds. It cannot avoid this duty by passing the buck to the SGA. In fact, Pitt breached this duty even before SFL was denied funding, as it imposed the student activity fee without safeguards in place to prevent viewpoint discrimination. As the Supreme Court held in Southworth:

Viewpoint neutrality is the justification for requiring the student to pay the fee in the first instance and for ensuring the integrity of the program’s operation once the funds have been collected.

To remedy this constitutional deficiency, Pitt must establish clear, precise and exhaustive standards to guide the SGB’s allocation decisions and to eliminate the subjectivity currently inherent in the process. Until that time, Pitt will violate the Constitution every time it exacts the student activity fee, and student organizations’ First Amendment rights will remain subject to the whim of the SGB.

In the face of growing proof that college students drift left politically and abandon their faith during their college years, the defenders of academia often put forward a series of hollow excuses.  Cloaked in various guises, these excuses often boil down to variations on three themes.

1.    College student move left because all smart people are leftists.

While some may find it comforting to think that all conservatives (or all Christians) are either evil or stupid, this notion is hardly reasonable.  It overlooks the host of serious, respected Christian and conservative scholars, people like Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson, Francis Collins, Ravi Zacharias, and C.S. Lewis.  And even the ISI study shows that as students understand America’s institutions better, their respect for our heritage and ideals increases. 

2.    Christians have no right to complain about university indoctrination because they do the same thing.

This argument ignores the vast chasm that separates private citizens advancing their values from government imposing its values on those citizens.  Within the church, individual citizens try to pass along their values to their children and other citizens (just like secular individuals and organizations), and they do it in the context of an increasingly hostile culture.  But at public universities, government officials (i.e., professors and administrators) impose their preferred values on citizens, and as they silence all dissenting voices, they do so in an increasingly uniform monoculture on campus. 

Thankfully, the Constitution does not ignore this chasm between private persuasion and government indoctrination.  It explicitly protects Christians’ freedom to hold, practice, and express their religious views, and even their freedom to persuade others to share their convictions.  But, to quote the Supreme Court’s landmark 1943 holding, the Constitution expressly prohibits the government from “prescrib[ing] what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

3.    College students move left as they hear leftist ideas for the first time after leaving home.

Of all the excuses, this one would have most merit except that it primarily relies a faulty assumption:  that students are merely following the evidence after hearing both sides of the debate.  Yet this is simply not the case.  Leftists outnumber conservative faculty by eight-to-one or nine-to-one in most departments (and thirty-to-one in some).  Half of them inject politics into the classroom, often conditioning grades on whether students parrot back the professor’s politics.  And when it comes to hiring, tenure, or promotion, universities routinely discriminate against conservative faculty members, thus preserving the leftist monopoly.  In the classroom, dissenting students face abuse from professors.  Outside the classroom, they face a gauntlet of vague, selectively enforced speech codes and Star Chamber style disciplinary charges.  If they hold events on campus, they face intrusive investigations and threats of expulsion.  And if they form a Christian student organization, they risk getting kicked off campus. 

So universities are neither dispassionately presenting “just the facts” nor allowing differing perspective to compete in an unfettered “marketplace of ideas.”  Instead, they are putting a thumb on the scale by promoting their preferred viewpoints and silencing all others.  Hence, the shift in student opinions merely reflects the campus environment, not the merits of leftist ideology.

According to the Supreme Court’s 1967 Keyishian decision, the purpose of higher education is to train the next generation of America’s leaders through the “robust exchange of ideas.”  But today, the ideological monopoly on campus produces college students that fail basic American civics but regurgitate university- and faculty-endorsed values.  Sadly, higher education is more concerned with teaching people what to think, not how to think.

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has wrongly declared that Trinity Western University (TWU) violates academic freedom because of its Christ-centered character.

CAUT bases its conclusion upon two facts.  First, TWU draws its faculty and staff from among those who voluntarily embrace its Statement of Faith.

Second, TWU “rejects as incompatible with human nature and revelational theism a definition of academic freedom which arbitrarily and exclusively requires pluralism without commitment, denies the existence of any fixed points of reference, maximizes the quest for truth to the extent of assuming it is never knowable, and implies an absolute freedom from moral and religious responsibility to its community.”  Accordingly, TWU “is committed to academic freedom in teaching and investigation from a stated perspective, i.e., within parameters consistent with the confessional basis of the constituency to which the University is responsible, but practised in an environment of free inquiry and discussion and of encouragement to integrity in research.”

CAUT has put TWU on a list of schools it says do not respect academic freedom and is investigating other Christ-centered universities in Canada, including Crandall University and Canadian Mennonite University.

CAUT acknowledges that TWU is a legitimate institution of higher education with qualified scholars.  It nonetheless has essentially deemed Christ-centered higher education to be pedagogically illegitimate.  This is a remarkable departure from precedent.  Many similar institutions have operated in the United States and Canada for many years with their distinctive conception of academic freedom.  The higher education establishment has accommodated and accepted the distinctive nature of such institutions, respecting their legitimate place in the tapesty of North American higher education.

I suspect that simple disagreement with (and probably even animosity towards) TWU’s religious commitments has motivated this unfortunate departure from the respect that the world of higher education has generally afforded Christ-centered higher education.  The notion that God is the source of truth and that He has revealed truth in Scripture is foolish and offensive to most university professors, who believe that the exclusive means for discovering truth is through empirical observation or rational deduction.  A disagreement over epistomology is hardly a reason to deem schools like TWU to be illegitimate. Yet this is precisely what CAUT has done.

JTA, which describes itself as “The Global News Service of the Jewish People,” has posted an article discussing the divergent choices various Jewish groups have made regarding Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.  As the article explains, some groups have filed “friend of the Court” briefs supporting CLS’s constitutional freedom to draw its officers and voting members from among those who share its religious commitments — both doctrinal and moral.  Others plan to file in support of the government or sit the case out.

The article features several remarkable statements by Deborah Lauter, the National Director of Civil Rights for the Anti-Defamation League.  First, she implicitly characterizes CLS as a group that is “opposed” to non-Christians and those who engage in extramarital sexual conduct.  It is profoundly unfair and misleading to characterize CLS’s statement of faith requirement as “opposition” to those who have different religious commitments.  The statement of faith expresses CLS’s core religious beliefs, positively articulating what brings its members together.  The idea that the founders and leaders of CLS started with some “opposition” to non-Christians and then wrote the statement of faith to express that alleged “opposition” is absurd.

Second, Ms. Lauter suggests that if CLS prevails, public universities will be rendered utterly unable to address actual invidious discrimination.  I continue to find it amusing that opponents of CLS’s position, finding themselves unable to mount a persuasive case against CLS itself, must resort to parades of hypothetical horribles.  Her remark reflects a conflation of real discrimination (invidiously taking irrelevant characteristics into account) and the means by which a bona fide religious group legitimately maintains its religious character over time.

Third, Ms. Lauter said that it is “antithetical to democracy” to allow religious groups that consider religion in their hiring decisions to participate in federally funded social service programs.  “Democracy” produced the 1996 welfare reform law, which acknowledged the right of such religious groups to participate in the provision of services to needy people with public money.  Large numbers of both Democrats and Republicans voted for this legislation, and a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) signed it.  Can one plausibly call their handiwork “antithetical to democracy”?  It appears as though “antithetical to democracy” means “stuff ADL doesn’t like.”

Hastings states that no group can deny voting membership and leadership to any student on any basis (not just on the basis of characteristics listed in Hastings’ Policy on Nondiscrimination, like race and religion).  Under such a policy, a student chapter of ADL would not be able to withhold voting membership or an officer position from an avowed anti-Semite.  Does ADL really believe that Hastings would not violate ADL’s constitutional rights by revoking its registered status under such circumstances?  Perhaps ADL is confident that Hastings would selectively enforce such a policy by, say, withholding registered student organization status from CLS while conferring such status on it.  That might not be an unreasonable assumption:  in 2004, Hastings conferred RSO status upon La Raza (“the race”) even though its bylaws expressly limited membership and leadership to those “of Raza background.”

Video: David French 2010 SFLA Conference: Knowing Your Rights on Campus

Click to watch: 2010 SFLA Conference: Knowing Your Rights on Campus

David French spoke at the 2010 Students for Life National Conference on January 23, 2010, in Washington, D.C. With a touch of humor and motivational thought,  he inspired more than 1,000 pro-life students to Speak Up for Life on their public university campus. He encouraged them with the knowledge that when they Speak Up and Stand Up, they are not alone. Behind them stands the strength of an Alliance.

http://www.speakupmovement.org
http://www.facebook.com/SpeakUpU
http://www.twitter.com/SpeakUpU