Professor is Fired Who Forced Students to Give Her a Fee She Donated to Planned Parenthood

State   |   Suzanne Bowdey   |   Jun 1, 2023   |   12:20PM   |   Washington, DC

Being a conservative on today’s public college campuses isn’t for the faint of heart. The students who survive the machete-wielding feminists and the professors encouraging the killing of “transphobe[es]” still have to sit through endless hours of leftist indoctrination. And in some cases, pay extra for it!

At Michigan State University, it wasn’t enough that conservatives had to listen to their marketing professor’s abortion extremism — they were forced to finance it. In a story that one attorney calls one of the worst instances of classroom abuse he’s seen, a member of the marketing faculty, Amy Wisner, was charging students a $99 “membership fee” on top of their regular tuition to join an online group called The Rebellion Community.

Nolan Radomski and Nathan Barbieri, both business majors, thought the whole thing was incredibly odd, since MSU already has a campus-wide learning platform that most classes use. When they asked questions, Wisner essentially told them that membership was mandatory. So, they dropped it.

Other students refused to let it go and started digging deeper. What they found shocked everyone. In some Facebook posts where Wisner was trying to drum up more members for Rebellion, she explained that all of the proceeds would be donated to far-Left organizations like Planned Parenthood. As pro-lifers and Christians, Nolan and Nathan were furious. The professor had made contributing to America’s biggest abortion business a condition of taking the required class, which Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Tyson Langhofer couldn’t believe.

“I’ve seen a lot of bad actions in my litigation,” he said, “but this is definitely one of the top ones because she’s got 600 students at her mercy, and she did abuse that power.”

“My money is in the hands of Planned Parenthood,” a frustrated Barbieri told Fox News. He and Radomski reached out to ADF, explaining that as Christians, it’s their “calling” to stop this injustice. “We’re supposed to expose the bad things that happen and not just sit back and … be abused,” the sophomore insisted. “[My faith] really pushed me to get out there and do something about it, because I knew if I didn’t, and if nobody else did, what stops this from happening again and again?”

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Nolan was just as adamant. “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.”

On Friday’s “Washington Watch,” Langhofer told guest host Jody Hice, “Here you had a professor who fabricated a requirement to join a group — a political group — that had nothing to do with the class.” In the federal lawsuit ADF filed against MSU, they point out that Wisner raised almost $120,000 last semester to spend on her abortion radicalism. In some Facebook posts, she admits: “100% of membership fees are donated to Planned Parenthood.” In others, she alludes that the dollars would also go to her personal mission of “burning everything to the f—ing ground.”

But that wasn’t all. As Langhofer pointed out, Wisner wanted the online community to help her travel the country “and start little rebellions to ‘burn down the patriarchy’ — whatever that’s supposed to mean. And so, it appears that she was also using this money to support her own RV tour” to take her political extremism on the road.

And the worst part of it is, “the professor made it clear that they couldn’t pass the class unless they joined the website. They had to pay that,” Langhofer explained. “In fact, all of the discussions were going to take place on that website” instead of the online forum MSU’s classes normally use. Just as incredibly, the interim dean of the business school seems to have blessed Wisner’s racket, which she claimed went to “(1) pay for use of the technology and (2) pay guest speakers, educators, and facilitators. Your professor does not receive any financial compensation from your membership fees as that would be a conflict of interest.”

But obviously, Langhofer argued, there were plenty of conflicts of interest. “No professor ever should be able to force students to join political causes, as you know, and as a part of an academic requirement.”

This was supposed to be Marketing 250 — not Extortion 101. And Michigan State officials must have agreed, because Wisner has been removed from the classroom, and the business school claims to have personally refunded students’ fees. Even so, the court case goes on. “Essentially, what we’re asking as part of the lawsuit [is for] the court to enter an order to prohibit the university from allowing any professor to ever do this in the future …”

For now, Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon worries about the culture — not just at MSU — but every public university. “Who needs DEI when the professors are all apparatchiks?” she asked. “Forcing students to fund a professor’s personal political activism is a new low,” she told The Washington Stand. “If this person is or was representative of the professoriate of Michigan State, who knows what other horrors we could find with a thorough audit?”

It’s time for conservatives on American campuses to stand up, Kilgannon said. “Too many students are willing to just go along for the ride, thinking ‘It’s only a semester/one class/one assignment.’ Thank God for students who will not just go along. They make the university a better place for themselves and the students who follow.” She points out that the Heritage Foundation did a 2021 study ranking DEI staff at major universities in all 50 states. Michigan State is #21. But, she adds, “this professor wouldn’t have been counted as a DEI professor or administrator in that study — which proves the pervasiveness of the problem, and why we owe a debt of gratitude to students like Nolan and Nathan.”

“State legislators need to exercise oversight of publicly funded universities,” Kilgannon urged. “The taxpayers of Michigan deserve better than this, and certainly so do the students.”

LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.