An adjunct professor at Michigan State University, Amy Wisner, is being sued by two of her students after requiring her business communications class to purchase a $99 subscription to an activist website she founded that funds Planned Parenthood.
The website, The Rebellion Community, was described in the class syllabus as "a global social learning community."
Several students looked into the website and found posts from their professor on social media which detailed the leftwing causes that their membership fees were going to, most notably, Planned Parenthood.
Though Wisner initially told students that she would reap no benefit from the subscriptions, the lawsuit said, students found out that Wisner operated the site and had said in different contexts that its proceeds would be donated to Planned Parenthood or used to fund "an RV roadtrip around the United States to co-create communities of rebels."
The university says that Wisner is no longer employed and the school has offered to refund the students the cost of their subscriptions.
The total amount refunded by MSU is almost $60,000, but the two students who are suing Wisner, Nathan Barbieri, and Nolan Radomski, say the damage has been done as the money they initially paid is already in the hands of Planned Parenthood.
Radomski said in an interview with Fox News regarding the lawsuit,
I shouldn't have to pay for my professor's political activism. This is a matter of free speech and I hope that the university changes its policy so that other students never have to pay expensive fees toward causes they don't believe in.
Radomski and Barbieri are represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) which filed the case last week arguing that professors should not be allowed to force students to fund causes they disagree with as a course requirement.
Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel for ADF, said that,
What Professor Wisner did here was completely out of the ordinary. She basically fabricated a requirement, put it on the syllabus to join this website, which had nothing to do with the course, and she could have used the free platform that the university provides, which every other professor uses. And then to do that solely that so she could fund her own political activism. And so not only did she use this as her own ideological mechanism to force the students to listen to her activism, but then she forced them to fund her outside activism and kind of double down on that. And I think that's a problem. And public universities just can't allow that to happen.
