Two Christian student organizations at Virginia State University have filed a federal lawsuit alleging the public university stripped them of their recognized campus status and placed them under the direct oversight of a university-appointed minister, while exempting non-Christian groups from the same requirement.
The suit, brought by Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of campus chapters of Women of Victory and Bethel Campus Fellowship, challenges VSU’s updated Campus Ministries Policy. Under that policy, all Christian student-led ministries must operate under the “governance and influence” of VSU Campus Minister Thomas Wynn and a faculty-and-staff advisory board. The policy also bars student ministries from affiliating with their national parent organizations.
Non-Christian and Muslim student organizations are not subject to the mandate, according to the legal filing.
ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer told Fox News Digital the policy amounts to the university penalizing students because of their religious beliefs.
“The message that it would send is that the First Amendment means what it says: that you can’t treat secular groups better than religious groups,” Langhofer said. “You can’t treat one religious group worse than another religious group, regardless of your motives.”
“It doesn’t matter whether your motives are unity or things like that. You can’t have one single campus pastor on campus that is able to control all Christian groups and then exclude the Muslim group and allow them to receive all of the benefits.”
Both Women of Victory and Bethel Campus Fellowship are local chapters of national organizations that run Bible studies, leadership training and spiritual development events for students on and off campus. ADF representatives said that while both groups still appear on VSU’s official website, the listing does not reflect their actual operating status under the new policy. The groups are asking a court to restore their standing as fully recognized registered student organizations.
Langhofer said “theological differences” between the university-appointed campus pastor and the student groups appear to be at the root of the dispute, though he could not say for certain.
“I don’t know whether that’s the fruit of this or not,” Langhofer said. “What it ultimately comes down to is an attempt to control what these groups are doing by the university, rather than allowing these groups to continue to operate in the same fashion as they’ve operated for a long time.”
Langhofer argued the policy runs counter to decades of Supreme Court precedent requiring public universities to treat all student groups equally regardless of viewpoint.
“The Supreme Court has held for a very long time that all student groups on campus must be treated equally, and you can’t single some out simply because of what they believe,” Langhofer said.
More broadly, Langhofer said he sees the case as part of a wider retreat by higher education from open debate.
“Higher education has really broke from its long-standing desire to promote intellectual diversity and to actually seek truth, and, instead, they are essentially telling students that any disagreement, that certain speech is violence and that hearing difference of opinions on important topics is actually not encouraged. It’s actually discouraged,” Langhofer said. “I think that higher education is really failing in its primary role, which is to educate the next generation … how to deal with living in a pluralistic society with people who have different opinions.”
Virginia State University, located in Petersburg in Dinwiddie County, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
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