The University of Alabama Cancels Magazines for Black Students and Women

​The University of Alabama shut down two student run-magazines – one for women, one for Black students. Why? The university holds that these publications’ targeting of readers among its 43,000 students constitutes unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

The theory suggests that the university is acting to protect Crimson Tide men who are writhing in pain from their exclusion from Alice, “the University of Alabama’s fashion and lifestyle magazine.” The same can be said for all the white, Asian, and Latino students who are in agony over their exclusion from Nineteen Fifty-Six, a publication dedicated to “Black culture, Black excellence, and Black student experiences.”

In other words, the university is singling out these publications for directing content to women and African-American students, which sounds a lot like – and is – viewpoint discrimination. “You cannot have a more blatant First Amendment violation here,” Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center, told the student-run The Crimson White.

We would add that it would be hard to have a more profoundly stupid violation, either. This ranks up there with the decision by the U.S. Naval Academy to protect its non-Black students by removing Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from its library.

Why is this happening? Universities have an understandable desire to stay on the right side of the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. To be fair, DEI ideology and administrative departments had become domineering presences in campus culture and speech, threatening academic careers over faux pas and linguistic misdemeanors. A correction was certainly needed, but we are now veering into overcorrection.

The University of Alabama is acting on its interpretation of a July 29 memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi. That memo included “non-binding suggestions” to help institutions that receive federal funds avoid “unlawful proxies” and “ostensibly neutral criteria that function as substitutes for explicit considerations of race, sex, or other protected characteristics.”

Somehow, that has become a directive to avoid any channelization of communication or free association between Black Americans (12 percent of both the U.S. and the University of Alabama population), and women (51 percent of the U.S. population and 56.5 percent of that university’s population). Taken literally, any lawful interest magazine would have to cater to everyone, of all races, both genders, of all backgrounds, faiths, and national origins. Maybe Fencepost magazine, courtesy of the American Fence Association, fits the bill. (Although some might find its “modern wood designs that keep us coming back” a tad bit risqué.)

The bottom line is that the university’s actions constitute blatant viewpoint discrimination – one of the clearest violations of the First Amendment imaginable.

We draw this conclusion from the U.S. Supreme Court in Rosenberger v. Rector, which slammed the University of Virginia in 1995 for denying standing to a Christian-based student publication. The Court majority’s abiding concern was viewpoint discrimination, not that somehow non-Christians would be discriminated against by the publication’s existence.

A society based on free speech is one that respects pluralism – Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, women, men, gays and non-binary folk, fashionistas, sci-fi geeks, and football fanatics. An effort to enforce an artificial homogeneity is not anti-discriminatory. It is just a new form of discrimination: viewpoint discrimination.
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We would not be surprised if between the time we post this piece and you read it the university will have listened to its lawyers and reversed these twin cancellations rather than face these students in court. As Nick Saban said, it’s never okay to lose a game.

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