By now, it is unsurprising to see courts correctly rule against college administrators who violate rights to free speech, association, and religious exercise. It is heartening, though, to see a federal district judge go further, by holding individual administrators personally responsible for these abuses.
In Intervarsity Christian Fellowship v. Wayne State University, federal Judge Robert Cleland ruled that the state school discriminated against the Intervarsity student group for requiring that its leaders be Christians. In withdrawing Intervarsity’s campus privileges, Wayne State treated that group differently from many similarly situated groups that require their leaders to possess specific characteristics or profess particular beliefs. Cleland smacked the school down, hard and convincingly, citing extensive case law in the process.
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Cleland’s decision was a sweeping reaffirmation, on multiple fronts, of First Amendment rights. By now, the arguments are familiar, and the merit of Cleland’s decision quite evident. Especially if, for example, a campus Muslim group is allowed to restrict its leadership to Muslims, then, of course, a campus Christian group should be able to restrict its leadership to Christians.
In sum, the decision is right and good. What’s particularly interesting about it, though, is that Cleland is not holding only the university as a corporate entity to account. Intervarsity also included individual administrators and board members as defendants, and Cleland refused to let the administrators off the hook. The dean of students and the “co-ordinator of student life” claimed they enjoy “qualified immunity,” a controversial legal protection devised by the courts in the early 1980s, from monetary damage awards for their violations of Intervarsity’s rights.
Cleland blew away that claim, and that’s what makes this case special.
Citing earlier 6th Circuit Court of Appeals case law, Cleland wrote that “a reasonable officer would know, in the given situation and with the information known to him at the time, that his conduct violated” the constitutional rights in question. In this case, the officials “plainly interfered” in the group’s “clearly established” rights under “well established” precedent of which all administrators should have been aware.
In this case, indeed, the chapter president specifically cited First Amendment protections in correspondence with the administrators before the administrators revoked Intervarsity’s status as a recognized student group. The individual decision-making of the administrators was thus made in full knowledge of the issues at hand. Their individual culpability was therefore evident.
Intervarsity was forced to expend significant money to remain active on campus after the administration revoked ordinary student privileges. Cleland thus wrote that he will hold a trial to determine what “compensatory damages” are owed. How that will play out is, of course, unknown. But the very fact that the administrators will need to defend themselves personally, as individuals, rather than hiding behind the university’s umbrella, should send a message to other college administrators across the country.
It’s high time administrators learn that anti-religious bigotry, most of which seems anti-Christian, will not be tolerated and that First Amendment rights must be protected. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, being sued, almost as much as the prospect of a judicial hanging, wonderfully concentrates the mind.
