Rosenberger V. University of Virginia - Background

Background

To fund student organization activities, the University of Virginia (UVA) charges and collects from the student body, a semestral “activities fee”. Registered student organizations, including “student news, information, opinion, entertainment, or academic communications media groups”, may use said funding to pay some of their expenses; the ineligible UVA student activities include “religious activities, philanthropic activities, political activities, activities that would jeopardize the University's tax-exempt status, those that involve payment of honoraria or similar fees, or social or entertainment-related expenses”. Moreover, the UVA student activity funding policy defined “religious activity” as one that “primarily promotes or manifests a particular belief in or about a deity or an ultimate reality”. The funds were disbursed via student organization requests for reimbursement of third-party expenses, paid by the student-activities-fund administrator.

In the case of Rosenbuger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, the plaintiff was the UVA student religious magazine Wide Awake, and later the petitioner before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1990, Ronald Rosenberger and other students founded Wide Awake, intending to "publish a magazine of philosophical and religious expression" meant to "facilitate discussion, which fosters an atmosphere or sensitivity to and tolerance of Christian viewpoints", and to "provide a unifying focus for Christians of multicultural backgrounds". The first issue of Wide Awake published articles about racism, crisis pregnancy, homosexuality, prayer, C.S. Lewis, eating disorders, and interviews of UVA instructors. The magazine was a registered student organization eligible for student activities funding, and requested some $6,000 to pay for printing the magazine. The fund administrator denied the funding, because the University classified Wide Awake magazine as a funding-ineligible religious activity, because it "promoted or manifested a particular belief in or about a deity or an ultimate reality". The editors appealed the denial to every pertinent administrator, and ultimately lost their case when the dean of students upheld the denial of student activities funds for the religious magazine Wide Awake.

Having no further recourse in the University of Virginia, Wide Awake magazine and Rosenberger asked the legal help of the Center for Individual Rights, which filed a lawsuit against the UVA, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, in the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia, who granted summary judgment to the University, ruling that denying student activities funding to Wide Awake was neither unconstitutional content-based discrimination, nor unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, and that the University's interest in avoiding violating the Establishment Clause justified not subsidizing the magazine. Yet, the district court did not conclusively rule upon the related question of whether or not the UVA subsidizing the student religious magazine would violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Wide Awake appealed its lost case to the Fourth Circuit court, which ruled that the University had engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, but that the University’s subsidizing the religious magazine would affirmatively violate the Establishment Clause. Wide Awake then appealed the Fourth Circuit Court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed to review the case.