Conservative student journalist’s lawsuit against U of I proceeds to federal court

Staff reporter, Campus Reform

A First Amendment lawsuit accusing the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign of infringing on the rights of three student journalists will proceed to court.

The federal lawsuit, which names multiple university officials as defendants, was filed on behalf of three Campus Reform correspondents on April 9 after they were disciplined for reporting on a campus protest that resulted in a graduate student instructor assaulting the journalists and damaging one’s property.

Two of the students, Joel Valdez and Blair Nelson, were the targets of Khan’s rage during the altercation, while the third student, Andrew Minik, merely reported on the incident for Campus Reform.

Campus Reform has learned, according to the Office of the Registrar, that the University of Illinois has allowed their co-defendant and anarcho-communist instructor Tariq Khan to resume teaching in the Fall 2018 semester. Khan will be teaching the course “HIST 310: Global Capitalism in History.”

His class registration went live just after Khan appeared on a panel of leftist instructors. During his speech, Khan, while acknowledging he is a co-defendant with the university, said “He’s lucky I didn’t flatten his ass out on the ground for talking about my children,” referring to the attack on Joel Valdez.

Valdez had asked Kahn whether he had “anything better to do” than protest President Trump, adding, “Don’t you have kids?”

Following the November confrontation, the students were issued restraining orders in an effort to prevent them from reporting on Khan.

According to the students’ attorneys, Khan began using the restraining orders to target the plaintiffs “for allegedly violating the orders whenever he or his wife was in the same place with one of them on campus,” thereby depriving them of their “journalistic and expressive liberties without notice or an opportunity to be heard.”

One of the students, Andrew Minik, was told by administrators that he should “stop writing about Khan” if he wanted the “situation to improve.”

In an effort to resolve the matter before it reached litigation, the students suggested a settlement, offering to drop the lawsuit if U of I would agree to dismiss “all disciplinary matters pending against Plaintiffs,” dissolve the “incorrectly issued” no contact orders, and provide nominal compensation for damages.

In addition, the settlement offer included preventionary measures to ensure that students’ constitutional rights are never again infringed upon, including a policy change stipulating that “the University will not issue ‘no contact’ orders without affording students notice and an opportunity to be heard and will not enforce ‘no contact’ orders, or any other provision of the student code, in a manner which would infringe upon a student’s First Amendment rights.”

As further insurance, the settlement would also have required the university to “sponsor and cover the costs of hosting a bipartisan panel on the First Amendment moderated by an attorney from the nonpartisan Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

“The University of Illinois, instead of agreeing to a reasonable and generous settlement offer, has decided to waste more of the taxpayers’ money to justify its unconstitutional action against the three student journalists,” Whitman Brisky, legal counsel representing the students, told Campus Reform.

Campus Reform reached out to the University of Illinois for comment, but has not received a response.

Follow Campus Reform on Twitter: @CampusReform

Now that you’ve seen what’s happening on college campuses…
…will you help us show the truth to more Americans?
As a CampusReform.org reader, you know about the abuse taking place at our nation’s higher education institutions, and you know how important it is to bring these stories to light.
College campuses are no longer bastions of higher learning. Professors indoctrinate students with their agendas. They even silence conservative and libertarian students with their attempts to suppress free speech.
“Conservative students have been treated as outcasts on college campuses across the country for far too long. We finally have an outlet to expose the hypocrisy and let conservatives know that they’re not alone as they wonder whether the world has gone mad.” —Rose V, CampusReform.org reader
In the past year, CampusReform.org has exposed the abuses and bias on our college campuses to more than 5.4 million Americans. But more of these stories have to make it into national headlines if all of America is to see the truth. And to do that, CampusReform.org depends on support from concerned Americans like you.
Will you make a tax-deductible donation to help CampusReform.org continue to investigate and expose liberal bias and abuse on college campuses?

LEARN MORE »

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!

Success! Thank you for donating. Please share BPR content to help combat the lies.

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.

BPR INSIDER COMMENTS

Scroll down for non-member comments or join our insider conversations by becoming a member. We'd love to have you!

Latest Articles