Tag Archives: Campus

News

Conservatives and Christians taking campus discrimination / censorship cases to court

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And they are winning – as The College Fix reports.

Excerpt:

They’ve been ordered not to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution. They’ve been denied promotions because of their faith. They’ve been forced to help pay for abortion-inducing birth control. They’ve been judged solely by the color of their skin.

And they’re fighting back. And they’re winning.

Conservative and Christian students and professors who have been denied free speech or faced discrimination and religious persecution because of their beliefs have recently enjoyed a string of courthouse victories in what’s amounting to something of a banner year for such causes.

There’s been at least six big legal wins in as many months.

Here’s one of the six that surprised me:

Last month, the high court gave the evangelical Wheaton College the injunction it wanted against the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, setting a national precedent on the matter.

Wheaton was among dozens of Christian and Catholic universities to file suit against the federal mandate, saying they should not be forced to pay for birth control if it violates their religious beliefs. Now the White House is writing new regulations to allow for such exemptions.

Consider Alan Sears and the pro-religious-liberty law firm “Alliance Defending Freedom”. ADF is one of the groups who defends the rights of students on campus.

I found a profile of Alan in this Breitbart article.

It says:

Alan Sears is a committed Christian attorney who served in the Reagan administration, including in the Justice Department, who became increasingly concerned about the ACLU and its leftist allies’ success at sterilizing American life of every reference to God, faith, and biblical values. After returning to the private sector, he was recruited by more than thirty Christian leaders to start an organization that would build a nationwide network to fight for religious freedom, the sanctity of life, the importance of marriage, and the rights of parents. The Alliance Defense Fund thus began in 1994.

Fifty years ago, references to faith were widespread in American life, where public prayers were common and official communications and presidential speeches would frequently cite the Bible or Christian belief, and such things were not controversial. Now the ACLU and far left has succeeded in giving us so many years of sterile secularism that it has become the new baseline. Many local school boards that once had to be sued by the ACLU to ban singing Christmas carols at a properly named Christmas Concert are now quite content to ban those carols on their own, and to order the concert renamed a Winter Concert.

Now the pendulum is swinging the other way. Instead of an ACLU lawyer suing that school on behalf of some militant atheist parent, now an ADF lawyer is suing the school for telling a Christian student that she cannot draw a picture of Jesus when she’s asked to draw someone who is important to her.

Headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona, Sears has built an organization that is every bit an equal to the ACLU. Its staff of roughly 200 employees includes dozens of lawyers, who coordinate the efforts of over 2,200 “allied attorneys” nationwide, in almost every state of the Union and more than a dozen countries around the globe. To date, these lawyers have contributed an astounding $141 million in pro bono legal work (yes, that means free of charge) to people and organizations involved in legal fights on ADF’s issues. These attorneys become part of the Alliance upon completing ADF’s weeklong legal training conference. (Full disclosure: I have attended this training academy twice—once as a lawyer in their legal track and once as a journalist in their media informational track.)

ADF also makes grants to support lawyers and scholars for their work on behalf of those issues of faith, life, marriage, and families. And its Blackstone Legal Fellowship program takes over 100 promising law students every year and treats them to nine weeks of excellent food and accommodations over the summer in exchange for spending their days in lectures and seminars on natural law, government, philosophy, and learning key legal doctrines, followed by six weeks of “field work,” to equip them for lifelong service of ADF’s mission-related issues in whatever field they end up pursuing in their career.

Something to think about if you are a young person. It’s a tough thing to make it through secular law school with your faith intact, but if you can, the benefits to all of us can be huge. It’s a high-risk, high-reward option for talented young Christians and conservatives to pursue.

News

In California, 95% of professor’s donations goes to Democrats

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From The College Fix.

Excerpt:

With midterm elections looming, an analysis of professors’ recent campaign contributions to California lawmakers found that about 95 percent of their donations went to Democratic politicians.

Dozens of scholars have donated nearly $200,000 to a variety of Democratic representatives, while Republican politicians only netted about $9,000 from scholars, Federal Election Commission records show.

In effect, contributions by professors to Democrat lawmakers outweigh donations to Republican ones by 22 to 1, according to the The College Fix analysis.

The analysis used figures listed on the Federal Election Commission website from January 2013 through 2014 spring filings. Both Political Action Committee and individual campaign contributions were included in the data. Only donors with occupations listed as “professor” were included in the tally.

The survey looked at all 53 U.S. congressional representatives in California as well as its two U.S. Senators, 40 of whom are Democrat and 15 are Republican.

The California lawmaker who appears a favorite among professors is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Pelosi’s Victory Fund PAC garnered the largest dollar amount in donations from professors by far at $50,500.

When people go to university, so often they think, I’ll just study whatever I want. But I think given the bias of most professors, a better plan is to focus on studying something in the STEM fields, especially math, engineering and computer science, where you wouldn’t be as exposed to the bias of these professors. Even if the professors are biased, there is not much they can do to inject their bias into a STEM course. It’s something to think about – and STEM degrees pay better, too.

News

North Carolina passes bill to prohibit discrimination against religious and political groups

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From Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

The North Carolina House passed a measure last week to prohibit university administrators from denying facilities, funding, or recognition to political or religious groups on the basis that they are exclusionary.

The bill came in response to Christian groups that have been stripped of their student organization status because they did not allow students with other beliefs to become leaders in their organization.

The bill, which has now been passed by both chambers of the North Carolina legislature, awaits Governor Pat McCrory’s (R) signature.

“Our society is engaged in an ongoing cultural battle,” said Rep. Bert Jones (R), the bill’s primary sponsor. “There is a war on God…Unfortunately these efforts have been extended to our campuses.”

[…]“We need to make clear that just because a student decides to attend our public schools and universities … that does not somehow mean that the student forfeits his rights to the university. This bill also recognizes that there is an important difference between education and indoctrination coercion,” Jones said.

The bill passed the North Carolina House of Representatives by a vote of 78-37 last Wednesday. All 37 votes against the bill were cast by Democrats.

Lest you think that universities are not really doing this to Christian and conservative clubs, here is an example.

From the radically leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

For 40 years, evangelicals at Bowdoin College have gathered periodically to study the Bible together, to pray and to worship. They are a tiny minority on the liberal arts college campus, but they have been a part of the school’s community, gathering in the chapel, the dining center, the dorms.

After this summer, the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship will no longer be recognized by the college. Already, the college has disabled the electronic key cards of the group’s longtime volunteer advisers.

In a collision between religious freedom and antidiscrimination policies, the student group, and its advisers, have refused to agree to the college’s demand that any student, regardless of his or her religious beliefs, should be able to run for election as a leader of any group, including the Christian association.

Similar conflicts are playing out on a handful of campuses around the country, driven by the universities’ desire to rid their campuses of bias, particularly against gay men and lesbians, but also, in the eyes of evangelicals, fueled by a discomfort in academia with conservative forms of Christianity. The universities have been emboldened to regulate religious groups by a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 that found it was constitutional for a public law school in California to deny recognition to a Christian student group that excluded gays.

At Cal State, the nation’s largest university system with nearly 450,000 students on 23 campuses, the chancellor is preparing this summer to withdraw official recognition from evangelical groups that are refusing to pledge not to discriminate on the basis of religion in the selection of their leaders. And at Vanderbilt, more than a dozen groups, most of them evangelical but one of them Catholic, have already lost their official standing over the same issue; one Christian group balked after a university official asked the students to cut the words “personal commitment to Jesus Christ” from their list of qualifications for leadership.

[…]The consequences for evangelical groups that refuse to agree to the nondiscrimination policies, and therefore lose their official standing, vary by campus. The students can still meet informally on campus, but in most cases their groups lose access to student activity fee money as well as first claim to low-cost or free university spaces for meetings and worship; they also lose access to standard on-campus recruiting tools, such as activities fairs and bulletin boards, and may lose the right to use the universities’ names.

So if you agree with the secular and liberal elites, you can form a club. But if you disagree with them, you can’t. Either way, you pay them your money.

You may also find this column by conservative professor Mike Adams to be of interest. He replies to a concerned parent who wants to know how bad secularism and leftism really are on campus.