A professor at Michigan State University (MSU) has been sued for allegedly charging students $99 to join a left-wing advocacy group as part of her course.
Filed last week, the lawsuit from students Nathan Barbieri and Nolan Radomski alleges that MSU marketing professor Amy Wisner required her 600 students to pay $99 as a membership fee to “The Rebellion Community,” a left-wing advocacy organization with ties to Planned Parenthood that focused on beloved far-left causes like “dismantling oppressive systems.”
“The Rebellion community is a safe place to coordinate our efforts to burn everything to the fucking ground,” a Facebook page associated with the community said, according to the lawsuit.
Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the students, claim that the professor had required her pupils to engage in speech “antithetical to [their] deeply held beliefs,” thereby violating their First Amendment rights.
“The Constitution protects everyone, both from being compelled to speak themselves and from being compelled to subsidize the speech of people they don’t want to promote,” ADF Attorney Logan Spena told Fox News. “And this professor was simply using her position as a faculty at a university teaching a required course to require hundreds of students to do just that.”
Wisner allegedly collected upwards of $60,000 in funds and used them to purchase an RV. The students, who described themselves as pro-life were also “aghast to learn that the fees they were compelled to pay as membership fees would be donated to Planned Parenthood.”
“When the government goes from restricting the chosen speech or association of its citizens to compelling them to speak its message or associate with its preferred confederates, ‘additional damage is done’ because ‘[f]orcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is always demeaning,'” the lawsuit claims.
“The same harms occur when the government compels speech through forced financial contributions, since ‘[c]ompelling a person to subsidize the speech of other private speakers raises similar First Amendment concerns,’” it adds.
MLive reports that Wisner initially told her students that she “would reap no benefit from the subscriptions,” which allegedly turned out to be false.
After the students complained, MSU allegedly removed Wisner from the class and “offered students a refund of the money they’d paid to The Rebellion Community, roughly $60,000 in all.” MSU spokesman Dan Olsen told MLive that Wisner, an adjunct professor, is no longer with the university. The students, however, claim in the lawsuit that Wisner should be forced to pay the money back, arguing that she is “still out there using these funds to promote ideas” students disagree with.
“The suit, which also names Judith Whipple, the interim dean of the Broad College of Business, and interim Provost Thomas Jeitschko, also notes that MSU’s current policies encourage professors not to profit from assigning their own work to students but do not explicitly forbid it,” noted MLive.
Paul Roland Bois joined Breitbart News in 2021. He also directed the award-winning feature film, EXEMPLUM, which can be viewed on Tubi, Google Play, YouTube Movies, or Vimeo on Demand. Follow him on Twitter @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.