## Facts

- Students and the student senate at a public state college sought to use student-activity funds to show an X-rated film (*Inserts*) on campus.
- Each semester students paid a general service fee; the college allocated a portion of commingled funds (about $60,000 annually) to the student senate for extracurricular programming, including movies.
- A student senate programming committee surveyed student preferences; “X-rated” ranked among the top categories.
- The college had no written guidelines governing which films could be funded or shown.
- Administrators decided the film would not be banned, but student-activity funds would not be released for any X-rated film; the film could be shown if funded through other means.
- Plaintiffs sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and sought declaratory and injunctive relief, alleging violations of the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment due process.

## Issues

1. Whether a public college violates the First Amendment by refusing to allocate student-activity funds for an X-rated film while allowing students to show the film using other funding sources.
2. Whether the refusal to fund implicates a constitutional right to receive information or a protected liberty/property interest sufficient to support a Fourteenth Amendment due process claim.

## Decision

- The court denied injunctive and declaratory relief.
- The refusal to use student-activity funds for an X-rated film did not violate the First Amendment because the college did not prohibit the showing and was not required to subsidize the expression.
- The plaintiffs failed to show a Fourteenth Amendment due process violation because no protected liberty or property interest was deprived by the funding refusal.

## Legal Principles

- The Constitution generally restrains government suppression of speech but does not impose an affirmative duty to subsidize protected expression.
- A government entity may decline to fund the exercise of a constitutional interest while leaving access to the underlying activity intact, so long as it does not directly bar or penalize the activity.
- A public college may exercise discretion in allocating student-activity funds for extracurricular programming; refusing to fund a category of content is not, by itself, unconstitutional where access remains available through alternative means.
- Procedural due process requires deprivation of a protected liberty or property interest; denial of discretionary funding, without more, does not establish such a deprivation.

## Conclusion

The court held that a public college’s decision to withhold student-activity funding for X-rated films, while permitting students to show the film through other funding sources, was a permissible non-subsidy decision that did not infringe the First Amendment or create a Fourteenth Amendment due process violation.


Swope v. Lubbers, 560 F. Supp. 1328 (W.D. Mich. 1983)