The Biden administration Thursday said it wants to roll back protections the Trump administration issued that allowed colleges and universities to fund campus faith-based clubs even if they required their leaders to affirm religious beliefs about marriage, abortion and other hot-button issues.
The so-called “Free Inquiry Rule,” issued by then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in November 2020, exempted campus religious groups from nondiscrimination rules observed by other college and university organizations, critics charged. Those who supported the rule pointed to several court cases that could have forced an evangelical Christian student group, for example, to accept a non-believer in a leadership position.
Saying it will focus on “First Amendment protections, nondiscrimination requirements, and the promotion of inclusive learning environments for all students,” Michelle Asha Cooper, acting assistant secretary at the department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, announced the potential shift in a department blog entry.
“Following completion of our review, we anticipate publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register to propose rescinding parts of the Free Inquiry Rule,” Ms. Cooper said.
Before joining the Biden administration, Ms. Cooper was president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, where she once asserted America’s higher education system “has operated on policies, practices, and assumptions that inherently privilege white, wealthy, and well-connected students over their peers. The insidious policies that disadvantage Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other students of color, as well as low- and moderate-income students do more than limit their potential. They limit the potential of our higher education system to be a true arbiter of social mobility and justice.”
Richard B. Katskee, vice president and legal director of Americans United, a church-state separationist group, applauded the Education Department “for its willingness to reconsider this harmful regulation, and for sending the message to colleges, universities and their students that this wrong may soon be righted. We anticipate that the Biden administration will agree with us that discrimination has no place in our public colleges and universities – even if religion is used to justify it.”
Americans United were joined by American Atheists in suing the Trump administration on Jan. 19, 2021 — Mr. Trump’s last full day in office — challenging the Free Inquiry Rule. The suit contends that Ms. DeVos “had no authority to issue this rule, ignored the harms that the rule will cause to students and their colleges and universities, and imposed requirements that directly conflict with the U.S. Constitution as well as statutory nondiscrimination laws.”
But the cases aren’t always as cut-and-dried, proponents of the rule argue. A group of evangelical Christians at the University of Iowa is fighting the school over its rules mandating leadership of the campus InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapter admit those who do not support the group’s tenets.
In 2018, the University of Iowa dropped InterVarsity from its list of approved organizations, along with 40 other groups, including what public interest law firm Becket said were “several minority religious groups.” Becket attorneys filed suit against the university and won reinstatement of the evangelical group in September 2019.
Most recently, university officials asked a court to rule that executives were not personally liable for their actions, but the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the request. The court said it was “hard-pressed to find a clearer example of viewpoint discrimination” than what happened in Iowa.
One supporter of the DeVos policy criticized the proposed change.
“Institutions of higher education are like second homes for young Americans,” said attorney Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, director of The Conscience Project, an advocacy group.
“They’re obviously allowed to belong to religious groups there – but now the Biden administration is telling them they can’t choose their own leaders,” she added. “It wants total ideological conformity from young people, and that’s sinister.”
*story by The Washington Times
