Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Funding Student Religious Groups

I recently blogged on a case in which a student religious group was denied funding by their university because they refused to comply with the University’s nondiscrimination rules. A recent Wisconsin case presents the even more basic group of whether a university can deny funding to student religious groups period. The answer, at least for now, at least in Wisconsin, is no:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison can no longer refuse to pay for student activities involving prayer, worship and proselytizing, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge John Shabaz said the school’s policy of turning down funding requests from student groups for such activities violates their First Amendment right to free speech. ... “The defendants have engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of plaintiffs’ First Amendment free speech rights,” said Shabaz, reading a written ruling in his courtroom.

The opinion is available here.

When I got to UCLA back in 1996, campus policy did not allow student fee funds to be allocated to religious or political organizations. In 2004, however, the rules were amended to allow funding to go to such groups, presumably to forestall just the sort of problems UW is having.