A Michigan State University (MSU) professor who forced her students to subscribe to a group that gives money to Planned Parenthood is being sued — and has allegedly been fired.
Earlier this year, Amy Wisner was working as a politics professor at MSU when she allegedly required roughly 600 students in her class to sign up for The Rebellion Community, which her syllabus described as “a global social learning community.” It cost them $99.
Wisner told students she would not personally benefit from the donations, yet students eventually found out she personally operated the site. She said the funds would either be donated to Planned Parenthood or used to fund “an RV roadtrip around the United States to co-create communities of rebels.”
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The students complained, and the university refunded the money they spent, which equaled approximately $60,000. MSU has since told Fox News Digital that Wisner is no longer employed by the university.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is now representing two of the students, Nathan Barbieri and Nolan Radomski, in a lawsuit, according to a press release. Barbieri told Fox News he was upset about the donations specifically.
“My money is in the hands of Planned Parenthood,” he said. “For me, as a Christian, it’s our calling. We’re supposed to expose the bad things that happen and not just sit back and… be abused. That’s our job.”
Barbieri also said that the university refunding his money isn’t enough, either. “I funded that. And until that money is brought back, until it is out of [the professor’s] hands, it’s still with Planned Parenthood, or it’s still … going towards an unethical organization,” he said.
In an interview with Dana Perino, Barbieri said the students found out about the Planned Parenthood donations on social media. “It was completely shocking having to find out through [a] social media post that your money is going to causes that are extremely left-wing and just against your ideological beliefs,” he said. “It was truly heartbreaking… [w]e found posts that said Planned Parenthood, and that was like the first one that really stuck out, and there were other causes and things that were involved, but that was like the main one that students caught on to. And seeing that, we just knew something had to happen because that’s not right and that’s immoral.”
Radomski told Fox News that it is an issue of first amendment rights for him. “I shouldn’t have to pay for my professor’s political activism,” he said. “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.”
Tyson Langhofer, senior counsel for ADF, said ADF wants to ensure this kind of thing does not happen again at MSU. “I’ve seen a lot of bad actions in my litigation, but this is definitely one of the top ones because she’s got 600 students at her mercy, and she did abuse that power,” he said.
He added, “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.”
