The University of Florida is being sued for failing to distribute funds to student organizations in a fair, viewpoint-neutral manner.
Young Americans for Freedom filed a federal lawsuit last Friday with help from Alliance Defending Freedom.
“It’s unacceptable that universities like [the University of California] Berkeley and UF are deliberately enacting policies to prohibit conservatives from fostering debate on campus. If these policies prohibited left-leaning groups from speaking on campus, the administration and student government would be labeled as fascist,” conservative UF student Anthony Leonardi told Red Alert Politics. “It’s time for universities to understand that if they try to censor students, they will be caught.”
The crux of the suit revolves around money collected from mandatory student fees, which are dispersed to student groups via the student government. The student government has arbitrarily categorized student groups as “budgeted” and “nonbudgeted.”
Nonbudgeted groups have significantly fewer privileges and less funding. According to ADF, there are 48 budgeted student organizations whose total budgets are in excess of $1 million. Many of these student organizations have budgets totaling more than $100,000. Meanwhile, the remaining 859 student organizations, such as YAF, share a mere $50,000. Budgeted groups received a budget for the academic year, while nonbudgeted groups must make a special request for funds upon each need for money.
UF’s YAF chapter is the only nonbudgeted student group to request fees for speakers’ honorarium in the last two years. While YAF received an allocation for Dinesh D’Souza to speak on campus, it was denied funds for other speakers and was told of a new rule change for nonbudgeted groups seeking financial support for speakers’ fees, a rule only impacting UF’s YAF chapter and no other group on campus.
“University of Florida administrators are limiting YAF members’ First Amendment freedoms by forcing them to pay into a system that funds opposing viewpoints. Worse yet, the university forces YAF to play an arbitrary, complex game of ‘Chutes and Ladders’ in the funding process, wherein the student group can continually be sent back to the beginning of the game at the sole discretion of the student government,” said ADF legal counsel Blake Meadows. “The university also changed its rules to apparently single out and disqualify the conservative group from receiving funding for speakers fees and honoraria — making it even more difficult for the group to express its viewpoint on campus.”
YAF contends these actions are violations of the First and 14th Amendments.
“This past year, the University of Florida denied UF YAF funding to host Dana Loesch and Andrew Klavan. That denial — and the timing of policy changes that, in function, only impact UF YAF — speaks loudly to the University of Florida’s true intention to prevent conservative ideas being heard on campus,” said Young America’s Foundation spokesman Spencer Brown.
