Why Does the University Establishment Despise Religious Speech?

February 8, 2011
By David French

For the last five years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been waging a fierce rear-guard action against equal treatment of religious speech on campus. While the university uses its mandatory student fee to fund a wide variety of student groups on campus, it has systematically shut religious groups out of funding — preferring instead to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into favored, liberal student organizations.

In September, the Seventh Circuit dealt a stinging blow to the university’s efforts to discriminate against religious speech, holding — in no uncertain terms — the university could not engage in viewpoint discrimination when dispensing student-fee funds, even if the funds were given to student groups engaged in prayer, worship, and “proselytizing.” In its opinion, the Court of Appeals relied on decades of Supreme Court authority (including previous litigation against the University of Wisconsin) and reaffirmed that “universities must make their recognition and funding decisions without regard to the speaker’s viewpoint.” the rest