Rutgers University should restore funding to its student newspaper after it violated the constitution by allowing students who don’t like what the paper publishes to vote to defund it, a First Amendment group claims.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) on Monday called for Rutgers to restore more than $500,000 to The Daily Targum, which lost its student fee funding through a referendum last month.

That referendum violated the constitution because it let students decide how public money is spent based entirely on whether they agree with what a student group does, said Adam Goldstein, a program officer at FIRE, a non-profit free speech advocacy group.

Students, including a conservative group that dismissed The Daily Targum as “fake news,” aren’t legally allowed to defund a public university newspaper just because they don’t agree with the content, he said.

“Rutgers cannot permit any student group to lose funding because someone didn’t like what they published, and that’s all a referendum is: a heckler’s veto with extra steps,” Goldstein said.

FIRE cited a 2000 Supreme Court decision involving the University of Wisconsin that found public universities can require a student to pay fees to support student groups whose beliefs are offensive to the student. That ruling also established that the method for deciding if a group gets student funding at a public college must be “viewpoint neutral.”

“The university must immediately reverse course and implement a funding process that doesn’t subject student newspapers, or any other student organization, to layer upon layer of impermissible viewpoint discrimination,” Goldstein said.

FIRE asked Rutgers to restore the funding and find a legal way to fund the paper through student fees. It did not directly threaten a lawsuit but suggested it would be easier for Rutgers to address the issue than risk litigation.

The university received the letter from FIRE on Monday and will take a careful look at what the organization said about the referendum process, spokeswoman Dory Devlin said.

The Daily Targum began printing at Rutgers in 1869 and became independent of the university in 1980. Since then, students have paid a fee each semester, and the paper was required to win a student referendum every three years to continue getting funding.

Since 2017, the Rutgers Conservative Union (RCU) has promoted a “#DefundTheTargum” campaign, dismissing the paper as “fake news” and accusing it of left-leaning political bias, Goldstein said.

The student group said its goal was not to destroy the paper, “but to give more freedom and more choice to the already over charged Rutgers student.”

This year, The Daily Targum failed the gain the necessary 25 percent of votes to continue the $11.25-per semester fee, gutting the paper of close 70 percent of its budget.

The paper launched a GoFundMe page that has raised about $15,000 in donations. It has yet to announce how it will offset the lost funding.

The $11.25 refundable fee, paid in the fall and spring, was factored into the $14,975 the average Rutgers New Brunswick student paid in tuition and fees last school year.

Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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