Young America’s Foundation announced a lawsuit against the University of Minnesota for violating the First Amendment rights of students on campus, by attempting to suppress attendance at a speech given by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
According to a press release issued by the organization, “Young America’s Foundation filed a First Amendment lawsuit against the University of Minnesota, in federal court, after University officials engaged in viewpoint-based censorship of conservative students and their YAF-sponsored lecture featuring New York Times bestselling author Ben Shapiro.”
YAF asserts that the campus has a long history of inviting left-wing speakers to campus, but engaged in “speech suppression” when Shapiro came to speak.
“University administrators schemed to limit student exposure to Mr. Shapiro’s conservative ideas,” the release continued. “They banished Shapiro’s lecture to the St. Paul campus, refusing to allow him to speak on the University’s main campus in Minneapolis, and they arbitrarily limited student attendance to 500 attendees. Internal emails obtained by Young America’s Foundation through the Censorship Exposed project revealed top-level administrators’ plans to arbitrarily cap attendance at Shapiro’s lecture and move the event to the St. Paul Campus—all despite misleading public statements to the contrary.”
YAF spokesman Spencer Brown says that the University of Minnesota is “depriving its student body of an intellectually diverse learning environment.”
“Administrators’ discriminatory treatment of conservatives—quarantining Shapiro and a limited number of students who wished to hear his ideas to a remote area of the St. Paul Campus—was a result of administrators’ disagreement with the viewpoint of Shapiro’s speech,” said Brown. “Young America’s Foundation remains committed to holding administrators accountable for their censorship of conservative students at the University of Minnesota and across the country.”
