The freedom of religious student groups at America’s public universities is under constant attack.  However, the Virginia legislature is the latest to fight back.

Way too many universities forbid religious student groups from choosing leaders and members that share their views.  Many schools contend that these groups “discriminate” on the basis of religion or sexual orientation.  Others have adopted so-called “all-comers” policies, which require groups to accept anyone as a leader or member, even if he or she rejects the group’s purpose, mission, positions, and perspective.  Sound absurd?

Well, the real goal is to marginalize theologically orthodox Christian groups that have statements of faith and sexual conduct standards.  The prevailing orthodoxy on America’s college campuses rejects (1) the exclusivity of Christ as the way of salvation; and (2) the contention that sexual intimacy outside marriage, including homosexual behavior, is immoral.  And, the campus orthodoxy has little tolerance for dissenting voices.  That’s why groups that have statements of faith and conduct standards are denied equal treatment.

Virginia lawmakers recently passed a bill that prevents politically correct university bureaucrats from punishing religious and political student groups that want their representatives to share their views.  The bill passed the House 73-27 and the Senate 22-18.  Both Republicans and Democrats voted in favor.

Foes of genuine religious freedom, like the Virginia ACLU, predictably oppose the bill.  They urge Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell to veto the bill.  The indispensable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the Virginia Family Foundation are among those asking McDonnell to sign the bill.

The Virginia legislature is not the first to address attacks on student group freedom.  Ohio enacted a law in 2011 that protects the associational freedom of religious students.  The Arkansas legislature is considering similar legislation.

Last year, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam vetoed legislation that would have protected student religious groups at Vanderbilt and other private universities in the state. The Tennessee legislature is currently considering another bill that would deny private universities state “police power” if they refuse to respect student group freedom.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate 2010 decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, which held that a public law school did not violate the Constitution by refusing, under an “all-comers” policy, to recognize a religious student group, it is encouraging to see state legislatures take a stand for freedom.  We hope that elected representatives in more states take up the cause.

Recently, our friends at FIRE celebrated a huge victory (along with legal network attorneys Robert Corn-Revere and Cary Wiggins) in obtaining a jury verdict holding Valdosta State University President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for violating student Hayden Barnes’ constitutional rights and awarding him $50,000 in damages.

The saga began back in 2007, when Barnes spoke out against Zaccari’s plans to build two new parking garages on campus at a cost of 30 million dollars, partially funded by student fees.  Barnes voiced his opinion and proposed what he viewed as more environmentally friendly alternatives by posting flyers, sending emails to Zaccari, student and faculty governing bodies, and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, as well as writing a letter to the editor of the VSU student newspaper.  Barnes also wrote to Zaccari to ask for an exemption from the mandatory student fee designated for funding the construction.

Zaccari responded by expelling Barnes from school, without notice or opportunity to be heard, for supposedly being a “clear and present danger” to the school.  The jury found that Zaccari violated Barnes’ rights by doing this and held him personally responsible for it to the tune of $50,000 in damages, payable to Barnes.

While college administrators violating student rights is certainly nothing new, often administrators have been able to avoid personal responsibility for doing so.  But this case represents a warning:  College administrators should no longer assume they can violate student rights with impunity.  Not only can they be held liable in their official capacities as university administrators, they can also be held personally liable for damages.  As more and more legal precedent is built, administrators will have less and less of an excuse for violating clearly established student rights like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and equal protection under the law, and for retaliating against students for exercising those rights, like Hayden Barnes did.  Congratulations to FIRE for a significant victory for the rights of students everywhere!

The National Association of Scholars recently issued a very interesting report regarding the state of history programs in the State of Texas, but the report has ominous implications for history programs nationwide.  Because of a 1971 Texas law requiring that students at public institutions complete at least two courses in American history, NAS decided to examine history programs there to see whether they were meeting this requirement.  What they found was disturbing.

The NAS researchers discovered that the history programs at the University of Texas, Austin and Texas A&M University (the two representative campuses used in the study) overemphasized politically correct topics such as race, class, and gender to the detriment of other important aspects of history, such as America’s diplomatic, scientific, military, philosophical, and religious history.   These important topics received little attention as more than half of the history faculty members at these institutions focused on the race, class, and gender issues.

The NAS study also found that rather than assigning important foundational and primary source documents for students to read as part of the history curriculum, 78% of UT faculty and 50% of A&M faculty instead assigned readings focused on race, class, and gender.   NAS states that Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and the Gettysburg Address, for instance, were rarely assigned, and numerous political documents, such as the Mayflower Compact and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, were not assigned in any American history courses.  Not coincidentally, these excluded documents tend to emphasize America’s religious roots.   Of the  100 “milestone documents” of US history published by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which includes texts such as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence, the report states that only 23 were assigned, and these were only assigned by five faculty members (out of the 46 total).  The report concludes, “In other words, 89 percent of faculty members teaching lower division U.S. history courses assigned none of the 100 key documents, and 77% of the documents went totally unassigned.”

But the history curriculum is really no surprise, given that the NAS study also found that 78% of UT faculty and 64% of A&M faculty had research interests in race, class, and gender issues, showing little academic diversity among faculty members.  For institutions that routinely emphasize “diversity,” diversity of thought apparently is not a concern.

Why should we care about these findings?  First, they are especially disturbing because they only promise to get worse.   Almost certainly as a result of the increasing imbalance of the history curriculum, the views of history graduates in academia are becoming even more polarized.  As KC Johnson pointed out on Minding the Campus,

The developing pedagogical groupthink is likely to become more, not less, intense as time passes and older faculty members retire. According to the report, “83 percent of UT faculty members teaching these courses who received their Ph.D.s in the 90s or later had RCG research interests, while only 67 percent of UT faculty members who received their Ph.D.s in the 70s or 80s had RCG research interests. 90 percent of A&M faculty members teaching these courses who received their Ph.D.s in the 90s or later had RCG research interests, while only 36 percent of A&M faculty members who received their Ph.D.s in the 70s or 80s had RCG research interests.”

He also points out that the problem is likely far worse nationwide, given that if any institutions should have more of a balanced view of American history, it should be these Texas institutions:

Texas A&M has a significant military contingent in the student body and alumni base. The University of Texas is home to the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs. Its campus hosts the LBJ Presidential Library. The Texas State Capitol is down the street from campus. The intellectual atmosphere on both campuses, then, is likelier to be far friendlier to “traditional” types of U.S. history than is the case at most universities.

This, in many ways, is the most depressing aspect of the NAS report. If UT and Texas A&M represent best-case scenarios among major universities in how U.S. history is taught, how bad is the typical campus likely to be?

Finally, it is extremely alarming that some of America’s most respected public institutions of higher education are graduating students who are essentially illiterate in important aspects of America’s history and heritage, which can only have negative impacts on how these graduates, our next generation, view our country, as well as the values they hold.

At Christmas, one would hope that the only controversy surrounding the Salvation Army and their iconic bell ringers would be their fictional dispute with Homelessville and Justin Timberlake.  But for a student body obsessed with political correctness at any cost, the mere presence of the bell ringers near campus doing their traditional collection of funds for the needy is intolerable if they are doing so in the name of a Christian organization.

As our friends at CampusReform.org reported, the student government at the University of California, Berkeley recently passed a resolution attempting to ban the bell ringers from campus.  Regardless of the fact that the Salvation Army helps millions of Americans every year, providing disaster relief, shelter, food, job training, community programs, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, youth camps, and many other programs, the Berkeley students sought to force administrators to revoke the bell ringers’ permits:

“Salvation Army church services, including charity services, are available only to people ‘who accept and abide by the Salvation Army’s doctrine and discipline,’ which excludes homosexuality . . . . Allowing the Salvation Army to collect donations on campus is a form of financial assistance that empowers the organization to spend the money it raises here in order to discriminate and advocate discrimination against queer people.”

The Berkeley students also felt it necessary to publicly condemn the Salvation Army, stating they wished to express

“disapproval of the presence of Salvation Army donation containers on campus” because “queer students…may take offense to the presence of collection containers operated by a discriminator religious organization in their places of living.”

Clearly the students felt that the purported “offense” to homosexual students outweighed both the right of the bell ringers to be on campus like others with permits, and the needs of the people the Salvation Army serves. (Despite the fact that record numbers of families are requesting assistance from the Salvation Army this Christmas.)  But the Salvation Army specifically denies the allegation that they discriminate on any basis—including sexual orientation—in providing their services to needy people.  And if the Berkeley students had just looked at the Salvation Army’s mission statement, available on their website, they would see that this is true:

“The Salvation Army, an international movement, is an evangelical part of the universal Christian church. Its message is based on the Bible. Its ministry is motivated by the love of God. Its mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ and to meet human needs in His name without discrimination.”

Ministry to the poor and needy has been a hallmark of the Christian Church from its earliest days—well before  government provided social services.  The Salvation Army bell ringers are merely carrying on this longstanding tradition of the Christian faith.  Ironically, the Berkeley student government has engaged in their own act of discrimination in attempting to evict these do-gooders from their campus simply because they work for a Christian organization, instead of letting students choose whether they want to drop their change in the red kettles.

I think it’s safe to say that they are on the naughty list this year.

Over at The Torch, FIRE’s Samantha Harris has been writing an excellent series on various threats to liberty on public universities campuses.  Much like our series a few years ago on equal access and student fees, not only does Harris discuss the variety of threats to freedom, she also flexes the legal muscle on why these policies must be removed.  Several of Harris’ posts include examples from Alliance Defending Freedom cases, like College Republicans at San Francisco State University v. Reed (a speech code case) and Roberts v. Haragan (a speech zone case).  Here are links to each part of the series:

The Problem with Mandating Civility

Misunderstanding ‘Harassment’

Free Speech Rights Must Extend to Students’ Online Expression

Posting Policies Frequently Restrict Student Expression

Misunderstanding ‘Time, Place, and Manner’ Restrictions

Alliance Defending Freedom, like FIRE, is working to eliminate these unconstitutional policies, but can do so only with your help.  Contact us if you think your university might be unfairly restricting your rights on campus.