Less than a week after the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed a lawsuit against Michigan State University (MSU) and one of its more radical professors, MSU fired her.
That is far from the end of it, though. ADF wants all the money their professor, Amy Wisner, extorted from her students over the last two semesters — an amount approaching $120,000 — returned, and sufficient changes to university rules to prevent such a racket from ever appearing there again.
As The New American first reported, Wisner required each student attending her class — one that is required by MSU in order to graduate — to pay $99 to join her own website, The Rebellion Community. The membership had nothing to do with the business class she was supposed to teach. Instead, it had everything to do with funding her recent conversion to radicalism.
She made public her conversion to radicalism in a TED Talk in May 2021, and her website reflects the radical ideology she required her students to fund, including the communist clenched-fist salute and demands that adherents “break the rules.” Her Facebook entries reflect her new radicalism with comments such as, “The Rebellion Community is a safe place to coordinate our efforts to burn everything to the f—ing ground.” Wisner also noted that “100% of membership fees are donated to Planned Parenthood.”
That’s when two of her students, Nathan Barbieri and Nolan Radomski, both Christians, filed suit with the help of the ADF. ADF’s legal counsel Logan Spena explained:
University professors can’t force students to finance and support political advocacy groups that express messages they disagree with.
Nathan and Nolan simply want to get a business degree without being compelled to pay membership fees that will be donated to Planned Parenthood or support speech that directly contradicts their religious beliefs.
Michigan State officials have violated the First Amendment and federal civil rights laws by authorizing professors to force students to support speech antithetical to their deepest values and faith.
The lawsuit was equally clear:
Using her authority under University policies to select “course materials,” Defendant Wisner compelled each of her six hundred students to pay a $99 membership fee to join an outside organization called “The Rebellion Community.”
Defendant Wisner controlled The Rebellion Community and used the membership fees to finance her own political advocacy and to support external groups—including Planned Parenthood—that engage in political speech that is antithetical to the Plaintiffs’ deeply held beliefs.
And MSU was party to the crime:
Plaintiffs bring this Complaint for compensatory and punitive damages and declaratory and injunctive relief in order to halt Defendant Wisner’s ongoing use of their funds to advance messages they disagree with and correct the University’s policies that, as applied, permit faculty to force Plaintiffs to finance and associate with external advocacy organizations as a condition of course enrollment at the University.
That’s why Wisner isn’t the only defendant in the suit. Also named is Thomas Jeitschko, VP for Academic Affairs at MSU:
Defendant Jeitschko personally approved the policy on the donation of proceeds received from assigned course materials at issue in this lawsuit.
The suit reported just how Wisner’s newfound radicalism transformed her class into an indoctrination center:
Defendant Wisner re-designed her course to reflect her own newfound political views. She admittedly stopped assigning grades in the course and stopped teaching traditional forms of business communication in favor of focusing on personal exploration and (what she perceives as) “growth.”
Explaining her new approach on a University-produced podcast, Defendant Wisner acknowledged that she stopped emphasizing forms of communication that students would be expected to know in the business world, but that her discretion permitted her to take the course in the direction she wanted.
MSU refunded the $99 each of Wisner’s students paid — but the school won’t be getting off that easily. Barbieri and Radomski, through the ADF, are asking the court to declare that MSU violated their First Amendment rights, and that Wisner herself be restrained from using any of the funds she extorted for her personal radical political activism. Further, Wisner is to provide a “full accounting of every expenditure” she spent through her grifting Rebellion website.
The suit also demands that all other professors be informed that university rules are changed so that such a scam won’t be promoted by any of them in the future.
All of this happened because two students, out of the nearly 1,300 who were subjected to Wisner’s extortion, stood strong for their Christian faith. Said Nathan Barbieri:
I hold true to my Christian beliefs. [My faith] really pushed me to get out there and do something about it, because I knew if I didn’t, you know, and if nobody else did, what stops this from happening again and again?…
Not only was it wrong in what she was doing. I mean … you shouldn’t be taking money for political activism from your students, especially forcefully because you can’t pass the class without this.
But definitely finding out, seeing Planned Parenthood and organizations like that are completely against my religious and my political beliefs really struck me.
This is precisely the sort of backbone believers must have to notify the radicals working to convert our culture to paganism that they have a fight on their hands.
Related article:
Michigan State Students Sue Over Being Forced to Fund Professor’s Political Cause
