Leadership Institute, et al. v. University of New Mexico

All too often, universities abuse their power to silence conservative students and speakers. College should be a time for robust debate and discussion on the issues of the day. Unfortunately, not all of our nation’s colleges and universities allow true diversity of speech. Instead, they silence students because of their viewpoints and the content of their speech. That is exactly what happened at UNM.

Rather than ensure that TP-UNM and Ms. Gaines were kept safe by staffing security with money from its multi-million dollar endowment and making it clear to the student body that it would discipline any hecklers, UNM placed the burden of safety on the students and Ms. Gaines. Worse, UNM does not follow any set criteria when enforcing its security fee policy. It is up to a single official to decide when and how much security is required at an event, giving far too much room for abuse and discrimination.

SLF Executive Director Kimberly Hermann states,

The government must treat all views equally, full stop. Yet when universities like UNM enforce policies inconsistently and with mixed results, like UNM did here, there is a strong inference of viewpoint discrimination. UNM did not even try to hide its discrimination when it admitted that it was charging excessive security fees to TP-UNM and LI based on the “individual,” Ms. Gaines, who speaks bravely every day about her experience competing against a biological man and the need to save women’s sports.

SLF Director of Legal Initiatives Cece O’Leary adds,

This is an unfortunate reality we are seeing all over the country: colleges are afraid of the woke mob, so they use all sorts of tactics to scare conservative students into silence, claiming that their views are just too controversial. Here, UNM used enormously high security fees to try to deter students from hosting their event. On other campuses, colleges use methods like bias reporting systems to police speech. And soon, we’ll see even more efforts to scare students into silence when the Biden administration’s changes to Title IX become law.