SAN DIEGO – On Tuesday, a federal lawsuit brought by attorneys with the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom against California State University–San Marcos came to an end after the university agreed to revise student fee policies and pay more than $240,000. The agreement comes after a federal court ruled last summer that those policies unconstitutionally discriminated against views the university didn’t favor.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed the lawsuit that prompted the policy and procedure changes on behalf of the campus chapter of Students for Life.
Under the agreement, the CSU chancellor’s office will within 90 days issue a system-wide policy on viewpoint-neutral spending of student association funds on speeches.
The chancellor’s office issued a statement saying the court found the auxiliary’s funding process wasn’t identified or documented adequately but that the court didn’t make any finding that viewpoint discrimination had taken place.
California State University is the largest four-year university system in the United States, with almost half a million students and 23 campuses.
In 2017, the Students for Life chapter filed the lawsuit, challenging the university’s funding policies used to fund groups with favored views, according to Alliance Defending Freedom. At the same time, the university prevented a pro-life organization and its campus president, Nathan Apodaca, from accessing student funding to promote their views.
Attorneys noted that the university funded the Gender Equity and the LGBTQA Pride Center with almost $300,000 in mandatory fees while denying Students for Life $500 in funding to host a visiting speaker on “Abortion and Human Equality” to provide a contrasting view.
In August 2019, a federal district court struck down the CSU–San Marcos policy of “back room deliberations” that lead to unequal treatment of student groups and directed both sides to reach an agreement on the policy issues raised in the lawsuit.
CSU–San Marcos has more than 100 recognized student groups. In the 2016-2017 academic year, the Gender Equity Center and the LGBQTA Pride Center received a combined $296,498 to funds its activities—57 times more than all other 100 student groups combined—compared to the less than $6,000 that was actually distributed to all 100 other student groups.
During the same school year, Students for Life applied for a $500 “Leadership Funding” grant to host pro-life speaker and University of North Carolina–Wilmington Professor Mike Adams to provide an alternative view. Even though Apodaca and other Students for Life members paid the same mandatory student activity fees that all students pay as a condition of enrollment, he and his pro-life peers were denied equal access to those fees to bring Adams to campus.
“We’re pleased that the court recognized the right of all students to be free from discrimination based on their viewpoint and that, as a result, the Cal State system will better align with the ‘inclusiveness’ and ‘individual and cultural diversity’ it touts within its community,” said ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom in a press release. “Today’s college students will be tomorrow’s legislators, judges, commissioners, and voters, and Cal-State San Marcos now understands that it can’t force student citizens to pay for advocacy of views the university decides are orthodox while effectively excluding funding for competing views. There can be no marketplace of ideas where the government favors certain views and suppresses others.”
“Public universities have no right to use their power, including mandatory student fees, to restrict or silence speech they don’t like,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. “Because of the initiative and courage of student leaders at Cal State–San Marcos, pro-life students at public universities across California will benefit from the administration’s policy reversal. Pro-life students should have every opportunity available to them that pro-abortion students have, and anything less is a failure on the part of the university to abide by the First Amendment.”