David Lynch Foundation Lawsuit: Allegations, Rulings, and Settlement

A federal judge approved a $2.6 million class action settlement on May 13, 2025, resolving the David Lynch Foundation lawsuit brought by former Chicago public school students who said the foundation’s “Quiet Time” meditation program coerced them into Hindu religious rituals in violation of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. The Chicago Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation each paid $1.3 million, and neither admitted liability.¹

The Quiet Time Program

The David Lynch Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2005 to promote Transcendental Meditation among at-risk populations. Working with the Chicago Board of Education and the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs, it brought its Quiet Time program to Chicago public schools starting in the 2015–2016 school year and ran it through spring 2019 in eight schools located in high-crime neighborhoods, including Bogan, Bowen, and Julian high schools.²³

Schools set aside two 15-minute periods each day for quiet activity. Students could read silently or practice Transcendental Meditation, a technique that involves silently repeating a personal mantra. The foundation provided the instructors. A companion University of Chicago study valued at around $3 million enrolled roughly 2,000 students to test whether meditation could reduce crime and improve school performance; no results have been publicly released.⁴

By June 2020, a Chicago Public Schools official confirmed the district was “no longer allowing for the official Quiet Time Program through David Lynch Foundation to be offered in CPS schools.”⁴

What the Lawsuit Alleged

Kaya Hudgins, a former Bogan High School student and a practicing Muslim, filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois on January 13, 2023. Her complaint named the David Lynch Foundation, the Chicago Board of Education, and the University of Chicago. She was 16 when she took part in the program.⁵

The heart of the complaint was the TM initiation ceremony, called a puja. According to the lawsuit, students were taken into a room and told to place fruit on an altar holding brass cups of camphor, incense, rice, and a photograph of Brahmananda Saraswati, the master of the Hindu guru who founded the TM movement. Students repeated Sanskrit words and were each given a personal mantra whispered into their ear, with instructions not to share it. Hudgins later discovered that her mantra was a name for a Hindu god.⁶

Coercion was central. Students who declined to participate or refused to sign consent forms were reprimanded, threatened with disciplinary consequences, or told their grades would suffer, the complaint said. Some were told not to mention the program to religious parents.⁷ Hudgins said she was sent to the dean’s office when she complained. She also noted that the school made time in the day for meditation but did not permit her time away from class for her required daily Islamic prayers.³

The Foundation’s Position

The David Lynch Foundation maintained that Transcendental Meditation is “completely nonreligious.” In a deposition, CEO Bob Roth called the puja a “lovely cultural tradition, and not religious in any way,” said instructors never required students to take part in it, and denied that TM mantras have “any deity connection.”²

Former TM instructor Aryeh Siegel disputed that account, saying the foundation treats the puja as “an inviolable requirement for learning TM, because TM teachers believe the ceremony ties the participant spiritually to the gurus being worshipped.” He pointed to a statement by TM’s founder, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, that mantras “fetch to us the grace of personal gods.”²

The Legal Basis

The plaintiffs relied on Malnak v. Yogi, a 1979 Third Circuit decision that struck down a TM course in New Jersey public high schools on Establishment Clause grounds. Applying the Lemon v. Kurtzman test, the court found the initiation ceremony and underlying philosophy met the constitutional definition of religion even without a traditional deity, and that the program lacked a secular purpose, advanced religion, and produced excessive government entanglement with religious practice.⁸

Lead plaintiffs’ attorney John Mauck of Mauck & Baker argued the ceremony had not changed since. “It’s all invocation to Hindu deities to channel their energies through the participants,” he told Religion News Service. “So that’s where it’s not teaching about Hinduism; it’s practicing Hinduism.”⁶

Key Rulings

U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly ruled on the defendants’ motions to dismiss on June 30, 2023. He dismissed certain state-law claims as untimely and threw out the Section 1983 claim against the University of Chicago for failure to state a claim. The Establishment Clause claims against the Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation survived.⁵

On April 19, 2024, Judge Kennelly certified a class covering students who participated in the Quiet Time program at the eight schools between fall 2015 and spring 2019 and who reached age 18 on or after January 13, 2021.⁹

How the Money Was Divided

Final approval came on May 13, 2025. Of the $2.6 million total:

Kaya Hudgins received a $100,000 incentive award as named plaintiff.
Attorney fees of roughly $860,000, or one-third of the fund, went to Mauck & Baker and the Leahu Law Group.
About $1.6 million was divided among 773 former students, working out to roughly $2,100 per student on average. Students who went through TM training including the puja ceremony (Group A) received payments three times larger than those who took part only in the silent Quiet Time periods (Group B).¹

No class members opted out or objected.¹⁰ The claims deadline was May 2, 2025, and Simpluris administered the settlement.¹¹ Under the final order, the settlement became fully final 61 days after entry absent an appeal, roughly July 13, 2025.

A Related Individual Settlement

A parallel individual case had already resolved before the class settlement. In October 2023, the Illinois Circuit Court approved a $150,000 settlement for Mariyah Green, a former Bogan High School student and practicing Christian who brought the same religious-coercion allegations. The Chicago Board of Education and the David Lynch Foundation each paid $75,000, and neither admitted liability.¹²

What the Parties Said

Mauck said the settlement “vindicates the concerns of former students and parents that the initiation ceremony and daily meditation regime were effectively demonic invocation and thus violated the Establishment Clause of the Constitution,” and said he hoped it would encourage the Board of Education “to be wary of harming students by allowing wolves to prey on the sheep they are obligated to protect.”¹

Hudgins, 22 at the time of the settlement, said: “I was just a teenager when I was pressured into a program I didn’t understand and wasn’t allowed to question. No student should ever be forced into a religious practice against their will — especially not in a public school. This settlement is a step toward accountability and a reminder that our constitutional rights don’t stop at the classroom door.”³

1
Legal Newsline. Chicago Schools Settle $2.6M Suit Over Hindu Meditation
2
Baptist Standard. Religious Coercion Lawsuit in Chicago Schools Settled
3
Mauck & Baker. Award in TM
4
Religion News Service. Why Did the Chicago Public Schools Just Quietly Drop Transcendental Meditation
5
CourtListener. Hudgins v. The David Lynch Foundation
6
Religion News Service. Suit Claiming Meditation Instruction in Public Schools Violated Students Religious Rights
7
Patch. CPS Class Action Over Mandatory Meditation, Hindu Rituals Proceed
8
Casemine. Malnak v. Yogi
9
Mauck & Baker. Federal Judge Grants Class Action to Students Alleging Coercion in Religious Rituals in CPS Schools
10
Purpose Driven Lawyers. Final Order and Judgment
11
Quiet Time Class Action. Hudgins v. The David Lynch Foundation Settlement
12
Chicago Sun-Times. Former CPS Student Awarded $150K in Religious Freedom Suit Over Hinduistic Meditation Program