Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording.

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The December 5 testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce centered on the rise of vitriolic and explicit antisemitic behavior among both students and faculty on American campuses in the wake of the attack by Hamas on Israel on October 7. The testimony featured presentations by three college presidents, Claudine Gay of Harvard University, Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), in which the witnesses spent four hours obfuscating, deflecting, robotically mimicking one another with legally engineered answers, and generally struggling to address basic questions on how they have responded on their respective campuses to an explosion of antisemitic speech and conduct in keeping with stated principles of freedom of speech.

The rampant double standards were clearly evident to anyone paying attention to prevailing campus culture at American colleges and universities. When pressed, higher education leaders wrapped themselves in their reverence for free speech—but without the slightest acknowledgment that their own institutions have systemically driven out heterodox voices (either through private harassment and isolation and/or via public shaming), disinvited and shouted down speakers, and spent tens of millions policing language and thought on their campuses. The intellectual and ethical muddle displayed at the hearing has continued in the days since, as several of the witnesses try to “clarify” their deficient statements and only deepen the holes they dug for themselves.

None of them seemed aware that they presided over echo chambers where claims of “settler colonialism,” “intersectionality,” “implicit bias,” and other manifestations of an obsessive focus on race and gender have replaced objective study of the human condition. They themselves oversee campus cultures where students are now more likely to endorse reflexively the primitive, destructive libels of antisemitism.

The dysfunction at Penn came to a climax on December 9, with the resignation of President Magill and the board chair. President Magill had been unable to give a full-throated yes to Representative Elise Stefanik’s question about whether calling for genocide of the Jews would violate Penn’s policies. But as Penn’s now-former board chair Scott Bok said, President Magill’s downfall was that she gave an insipid legal answer to what was a moral question, and the moral and ethical bankruptcy in evidence at that moment was deafening. What kind of campus produces students in such significant numbers who demonstrate in favor of a terrorist group guilty of the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust?

Then there is the compelling matter of consistency of policy. Penn, like so many other institutions, has suddenly hewed to the principle of free expression. How strange that it is emerging now, after October 7, on a campus where faculty and administrators have continued a multi-year effort to silence Penn Law Professor Amy Wax for speech they openly acknowledge is protected.

For example, it was Harvard’s Claudine Gay who stood by as distinguished biologist Carole Hooven was systematically ostracized and marginalized—effectively driven from her teaching career for supporting the incontrovertible scientific fact of biological sex difference. Claudine Gay has so far avoided the reckoning with her board and faculty. The finding that only 3% of Harvard faculty identify as conservative speaks volumes about that campus’s readiness to burst into pro-Hamas jubilation on October 8.

As significant as President Magill’s departure is, it is hardly the national catharsis needed to remedy the ethical bankruptcy of our current campus culture. Penn, its elite sister institutions, and many other American colleges have far more to do.

To see real course correction, new leadership with a deep commitment to free expression—armed with the authority to make these changes—is now required. Unfortunately, higher education leaders appear to be taking exactly the wrong lesson from the hearings and subsequent developments. Though they failed to speak when conscience alone would have summoned them to condemn the barbarity of Hamas, what they must not do now is intensify censorship and add to the already lengthy list of prohibited speech in yet another ham-fisted attempt to remediate their own sorry past performances.

Instead of policing speech, college presidents should remove barriers to free expression and worry exclusively about fairly enforcing codes of conduct that forbid violence and terroristic threats. If chanting the words “Whites only” at a campus rally is per se harassment, so should be “Globalize intifada.” Claudine Gay needs to think that through. Whether speech is protected is not dependent upon its content.

Further steps: Commit to regaining intellectual diversity among the faculty and administrators. Cashier the wasteful DEI bureaucrats who enforce the monoculture and police speech and thought. Eliminate all mandatory requirements for signed DEI statements and reestablish fair hiring procedures to ensure long-term intellectual diversity within and across departments and programs. Institute annual mandatory teaching modules that instruct everyone on campus about the history of free expression and the value of civil discourse and tolerance on campus.

As journalist and founder of the Free Press Bari Weiss observed in her November 10 Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture before the Federalist Society, “The proliferation of antisemitism, as always, is a symptom. When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that the society itself is breaking down. That it is dying.”

The disappearance of intellectual diversity among faculty and administrators and the rise of the thought and speech police is a disease rampant on far too many college campuses, particularly the elite ones. We can only hope that the regime change at Penn will also be a harbinger of a thorough change of campus culture, there and elsewhere.

This piece appeared on Forbes on December 14, 2023.

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Unfortunately, that is a likely outcome. Before she resigned, University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill said the university’s policies needed to be “clarified and evaluated.” A member of Penn’s Open Expression Committee has argued we need to restrict speech to fight antisemitism. The University of Michigan has announced a new institute to address antisemitism that is couched in the language of diversity, equity and, inclusion (DEI) – an ideology that fuels both antisemitism and speech suppression on campus. Harvard University’s response included expanding DEI resources as well.

Most American colleges and universities are dominated by monocultures that actively discourage and root out heterodox thinkers. Consider, for example, a recent survey that found only three per cent of Harvard University faculty are conservative, while 77 per cent are liberal or very liberal (progressive and leftist were not offered as choices). At the University of Pennsylvania, 99.7 per cent of faculty political donations went to Democrats last year. Should we give these majorities more power to suppress speech rather than less?

Academic institutions have abused individuals for daring to express unfashionable viewpoints. Biologist Carole Hooven was made miserable at Harvard for teaching that sex is binary. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was disinvited from giving a lecture at MIT because he had written about the importance of merit, fairness, and equality in the sciences. Penn Law Professor Amy Wax is still under investigation at Penn for questioning affirmative action. Do we want to enable institutions to justify their actions in these cases and repeat the behavior?

Universities should be places to engage in intellectual pursuits for their own sake, but many of the people who inhabit these institutions treat the intellectual life as a means to their ideological ends. They protest rather than listen, act rather than think. Whole departments and programs have been created or colonized by activist ideologues who think this way and exclude anyone who disagrees with them. They use power rather than persuasion to achieve their purposes whenever they can. Why would we further enable them?

And the problem is likely to get worse before it gets better, as the upcoming generation is even more intolerant than the current one. The process of breaking the ideological monopolies on our college campuses and replacing conformity with freedom and intolerance with openness is going to be generational. Reacting in this heated moment with the wrong policies will only delay vital reform – or ensure that it never comes to fruition at all. We should be working to improve and solidify policies that can help the heterodox to withstand the pressures they will inevitably face rather than giving the next generation the tools to create an “unmitigated and grinding despotism,” to quote Tacitus.

At the same time, there are ways to confront antisemitism (and other forms of hate) on our campuses. Institutions should have clear (but viewpoint neutral) policies concerning public safety, discrimination, and harassment. They should have fair rules regulating student groups, on-campus events, and protests. And it is essential that they enforce these policies. Too often, university leaders back down, as MIT did when it threatened protesters with suspension during an unauthorized demonstration, but then failed to follow through when they refused to comply.

Universities must also make substantial educational and personnel changes, instituting curricula that do not begin and end with critical theory while ensuring that hiring processes support rather than subvert intellectual diversity.

Antisemitism is repulsive and must be confronted. But it would only exacerbate the tragedy of American higher education to respond to the outrages we have witnessed by implementing policies and setting precedents that will further enable the very people who are responsible for debasing our institutions to do even more damage to them.

This post appeared on The Telegraph on December 13, 2023.

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In stunning irony, the leadership of so many of the nation’s top colleges and universities, initially unable to give a full-throated condemnation of a terrorist attack on Israeli civilians of monstrous savagery, miraculously discovered institutional neutrality and murmured effetely instead. In response to the backlash, they appeal to free expression, but their campuses have only what Penn donor and alumnus Clifford Asness has called “asymmetrical free speech where some have it and some don’t.”

While Penn Carey Law School’s eminent Professor Amy Wax is placed under investigation with serious threat of termination for alleged racial insensitivity, a professor who posted the logo of the military wing of Hamas on Facebook days after that terrorist organization’s horrific attack on Israeli civilians receives nothing more than an email.

Roger Waters, a notorious antisemite, is allowed to speak on Penn’s campus, but young women forced to share a locker room with a biological male are told, “Don’t talk to the media. You will regret it.”

At Harvard, the same President Claudine Gay who was instrumental in punishing gifted African American economist Roland Fryer, who dared to advance a data-driven challenge to the meme of racist policing, says pro-Hamas students will neither be punished nor sanctioned. Carole Hooven, who was canceled for stating a biological fact, might disagree with President Gay’s claim that Harvard “embraces a commitment to free expression.”

When the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first formulated the principles of academic freedom in its 1915 Declaration, the primary concern was undue pressure on faculty from donors and trustees. Times have changed. Now the greatest threat to free expression comes from within the institutions themselves. Hiring aims at ideological self-replication, and heterodox thinkers who somehow sneak in are punished as heretics if they speak up.

No one is surprised that these schools are ideological silos tilted to the left, but the numbers are still shocking. Only 3% of faculty at Harvard identify as conservative. An astounding 99.7% of political donations made by Penn faculty in 2021-22 went to Democrats.

Our institutions of higher education need reform, and the people inside them have shown little interest in starting the process. Many are in complete denial that anything needs to change. The American people think differently: Only 36% (19% of Republicans) say they have confidence in American higher education.

There are some internal signs of hope, such as the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, but the broader pattern among faculty and administrators is obstinate, self-righteous resistance. Normally, faculty complain that no one reads their work. Now that people are paying attention, the faculty senate tri-chairs at Penn complain that “freedom of thought, inquiry, and speech … are being threatened by individuals outside of the University who are surveilling both faculty and students in an effort to intimidate them and inhibit their academic freedom.” Where were these faculty leaders when dozens of their colleagues and students demanded sanctions against Amy Wax for daring to write that bourgeois values such as being “neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable” are drivers of success? They have been silent while Penn’s tribunal weighs terminating this distinguished professor, who has argued 15 cases before the Supreme Court and received Penn’s highest award for teaching excellence.

Unwilling to defend academic freedom when it mattered, the faculty senate speaks now only to insult its donors and alumni. “Let us be clear,” the tri-chairs write: “academic freedom is an essential component of a world-class university and is not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission.” What gratitude! Not to be outdone, the Penn chapter of the AAUP, also silent on matters of academic freedom in recent years, complains about “donors directly contacting academic programs that rely on them financially” and says trustees and donors “have attempted to abuse the power that comes with wealth.” Is Penn holding a competition to see who can chase away the most donors?

The disingenuous administrators and faculty who run our elite academic institutions have had their chance to govern autonomously. We see where they have led us. Now is a time for trustees, donors, and alumni to intervene and give these institutions the gift of reform they so urgently need.

This post originally appeared on RealClear Politics on November 17, 2023.

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The program appeared to be running smoothly until the most recent legislative session, when an important amendment was approved to one subsection of the law. Heretofore approved religious private colleges became ineligible for the program if they “require a faith statement from a secondary student seeking to enroll in a postsecondary course” or “base any part of the admission decision on a student’s race, creed, ethnicity, disability, gender, or sexual orientation or religious beliefs or affiliations.” The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty brought a lawsuit against the state of Minnesota on behalf of two families whose high school-age children wished to take dual enrollment courses at two Christian colleges, Crown College and University of Northwestern – St. Paul. According to the complaint, “during meetings of the Senate Committee on Education Policy, members of the committee stated clearly their intent to exclude religious schools from receiving public dollars.”

The amendment may have initially withstood a constitutional challenge had it been enacted before this decade’s two important free exercise of religion Supreme Court cases. Then, the state would have argued that a case from 2004 called Locke v. Davey should control. In Davey, the Court ruled that a Washington state law prohibiting the use of public scholarship money for “devotional” degree programs (where the matriculant becomes a minister) was constitutional. While noting that Washington’s legislature could have allowed scholarship recipients to use their aid to receive devotional degrees, the Court decided 7 to 2 that their refusal to do so did not violate Davey’s First Amendment rights.

The 2020s have been a different story. In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Supreme Court took up a case brought by a parent who wished to use state scholarship money to attend a private, religious secondary school. The state law permitted parents to use the money for their child’s attendance at any school in the state, parochial, private, charter, or public. The Montana Supreme Court ruled against the constitutionality of the state law, deciding that it violated the “no-aid” clause of Montana’s state constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in a 5-4 vote that the application of this state constitution clause triggered strict scrutiny review because it denied access to religious schools purely because of their religious nature.

The other relevant case is Carson v. Makin. There, a group of Maine parents challenged the state’s unusual scheme of funding public education. In Maine, there are 260 school administrative units, none of which is obligated to maintain a secondary school (at the time of litigation, 143 did not). Units without a secondary school may either decide to contract with another public school or approved private school for students residing in their unit, or pay the tuition at the public school or approved private school of the parent’s choice at which the student is accepted. The law allowed only nonsectarian private schools to be approved. The lower federal courts ruled in favor of the constitutionality of the state scheme, but the Supreme Court narrowly ruled (5-4 again) that the “nonsectarian” requirement violated the Free Exercise Clause.

These cases, along with the related Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (which, like Makin and Espinoza was written by Chief Justice Roberts) make clear that governmental programs designed for the general public’s benefit cannot discriminate against religious institutions because of their religious character. That explains why the U.S. District Court issued a preliminary injunction on June 14 barring enforcement of the PSEO amendment. The plaintiffs don’t intend to stop there; Becket attorney Diana Thomson said, “The next step is for the court to strike down this ban for good.” Legislatures in other states with PSEO programs, like Washington, Ohio, and Florida, are now on alert.

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The department seeks to rescind these regulations because it argues that “they are not necessary to protect the First Amendment right to free speech and free exercise of religion; have created confusion among institutions; and prescribe an unduly burdensome role for the Department to investigate allegations regarding IHEs’ treatment of religious student organizations.”[1] These arguments are simply not true. In fact, there are multiple recent instances in which religious student groups at public higher education institutions were treated unfairly due to their stated missions.

Consider the 2021 lawsuit between the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the student group Ratio Christi, an organization that seeks to advance, teach, and defend Christian beliefs. This group requested student activity funding of $1,500 from the university to invite Notre Dame University Professor Robert Audi to give a lecture on the rationality of believing in God. The university denied the group’s request, expressing that the school would not promote “speakers of a political or ideological nature,” even though student organizations with secular missions were regularly allowed to invite speakers without pushback from university administration. In response, Ratio Christi filed a lawsuit in Nebraska’s U.S. District Court, and in December 2022, two university officials agreed to settle the case, as well as change the university’s policies to ensure fair and viewpoint-neutral treatment of student groups.[2]

In 2020, the Students for Life group at the Georgia Institute of Technology filed a lawsuit against several officials, alleging that the group was discriminated against because it was denied a request for funds to invite pro-life activist Alveda King to an event. The lawsuit claimed that the student government association denied funding on account of Ms. King’s religious and pro-life views, a violation of the civil liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. Later that same year, Georgia Tech officials agreed to a settlement with Students for Life and corrected the institution’s policies.[3]

Even though both lawsuits reached settlements and both institutions agreed to update their policies, these stories clearly demonstrate the necessity of the regulations that the Department of Education is proposing to rescind. All student organizations at both public and private colleges and universities should be afforded equal opportunities to advance their missions so long as their actions do not conflict with constitutional protections.

Furthermore, the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires religious liberty protections:

SEC. 112. [20 U.S.C. 1011a] PROTECTION OF STUDENT SPEECH AND ASSOCIATION RIGHTS. (a) PROTECTION OF RIGHTS.—(1) It is the sense of Congress that no student attending an institution of higher education on a full- or part-time basis should, on the basis of participation in protected speech or protected association, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination or official sanction under any education program, activity, or division of the institution directly or indirectly receiving financial assistance under this Act, whether or not such program, activity, or division is sponsored or officially sanctioned by the institution. (2) It is the sense of Congress that— (F) nothing in this paragraph shall be construed to modify, change, or infringe upon any constitutionally protected religious liberty, freedom, expression, or association.[4]

These stories, and others like them, along with existing statute, are reason enough for the Department of Education to continue to investigate allegations of unfair treatment of religious student organizations and, if necessary, to rescind full or partial grant funding until the institution corrects its policies.

[1] U.S. Department of Education, “Direct Grant Programs, State-Administered Formula Grant Programs Proposed Rule,” ED-2022-OPE-0157-0001, posted February 22, 2023, https://www.regulations.gov/document/ED-2022-OPE-0157-0001.

[2] Leah MarieAnn Klett, “Christian group wins lawsuit against university that denied funding of philosopher’s lecture on God,” The Christian Post, December 20, 2022, https://www.christianpost.com/news/christian-group-wins-discrimination-lawsuit-against-university.html.

[3] Michael Gryboski, “Pro-life students sue Georgia Tech over refusal to fund Alveda King event,” The Christian Post, April 3, 2020, https://www.christianpost.com/news/pro-life-students-sue-georgia-tech-over-refusal-to-fund-alveda-king-event.html.

[4] “Higher Education Act of 1965.” U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed March 23, 2023. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-765/pdf/COMPS-765.pdf.

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“Who is the next Billy Graham? It is millions of contagious Christians who are trained, equipped, and deployed,” said Strobel. “We have a vision to fulfill this mission as quickly as possible.”

The Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics will offer accredited courses on the undergraduate and graduate levels—all designed to help churches, ministries, and individual Christians share and defend their faith naturally and effectively.

CCU is the preeminent interdenominational Christian university in the Rocky Mountain region, with an online impact that spans the globe. “We stand within the great tradition of Christian universities who are serious about faith and the gospel, and we’re thrilled to have Lee Strobel join our team,” said CCU President Don Sweeting. “Strobel’s background as a former atheist, portrayed in the book and film The Case for Christ, gives him valuable insight into how to reach people who are far from God.”

Described in the Washington Post as “one of the evangelical community’s most popular apologists,” Strobel has authored more than forty books and curricula that have sold nearly 14 million copies, including The Case for Faith, The Case for a Creator, and The Case for Miracles. The Yale-trained former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune also has been a teaching pastor at three of the largest and most evangelistic churches in the country.

The Center’s executive director is Strobel’s long-time ministry associate Mark Mittelberg, the best-selling author of such books as Confident Faith, The Reason Why Faith Makes Sense, and The Questions Christians Hope No One Will Ask (With Answers).

Through their Becoming a Contagious Christian training course, Strobel and Mittelberg have already equipped nearly two million Christians worldwide in how to reach others with the gospel. They have also led the outreach and apologetics efforts of one of the largest and most outreach-oriented churches in America, and for three decades have innovated evangelism and apologetics conferences, training seminars, national simulcasts, and outreach events.

Strobel explained that the word apologetics comes from a Greek term used in the Bible for defending the faith—something, he added, that’s needed more than ever in our increasingly skeptical nation. “We’re focusing on what we’re calling ‘applied apologetics,’ which means we’re going to equip Christians who will be actively engaged in the marketplace of ideas—in local churches and communities, in the media, in the entertainment world, on the Internet, and throughout popular culture,” he said.

Strobel and Sweeting agreed that CCU is the perfect home for the new center. Explained Sweeting: “It is a Strategic Priority of Colorado Christian University to share the love of Christ on campus and around the world, and to teach our students to be evangelists. The Strobel Center at CCU is an incredible vehicle to enable us to make new strides to achieve these priorities.”

One of the Center’s unique objectives is to train and certify evangelism directors for local churches, who will serve full-time, part-time or on a volunteer basis in partnership with the senior pastor in order to mobilize the church to reach their community for Christ.

“We believe in the power of leadership,” Mittelberg said. “The senior pastor can’t do everything himself. We want to equip, mentor, and deploy leaders who will work creatively and effectively under the direction of the senior pastor to reach everyone with the gospel.”

To facilitate that training, the Center’s courses will be offered through CCU Online so that people from all backgrounds and stages of life can study from the convenience of their own home. “The Center will feature the latest and most creative technology, the most current and proven content, and live interaction with passionate and credentialed educators,” Strobel said.

Other unique features of the Center include organizing a Think Tank, composed of leading Christian scholars, innovators, and practitioners, to collaborate on fresh ways of explaining and spreading the gospel, as well as hosting national conferences to share best practices and encourage churches in saturating their communities with the Christian message.

Founded in 1914, Colorado Christian University provides Christ-centered higher education that transforms students to impact the world with grace and truth. Located in Lakewood, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, CCU is consistently ranked in the top 2 percent of colleges nationwide for its core curriculum by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

CCU offers undergraduate and graduate degrees for traditional and adult students through its College of Undergraduate Studies and College of Adult and Graduate Studies. More than 8,000 students attend the University on the main campus, in regional centers throughout Colorado, and online. The Strobel Center’s courses are expected to begin Fall 2020.

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The proposed amendments erase the exemption that previously allowed religious schools to operate in accordance with their faith-based standards. They would require schools that accept Cal Grant money to compromise their religious principles to accommodate overly broad, government-enforced nondiscrimination regulations.  These schools would be stripped of a wide range of abilities, including the ability to enforce sexual conduct standards in housing and restrooms and the ability to utilize employment practices and student admission policies pursuant to their religious beliefs.

The bill is generous enough to vaguely allow a few lucky religious schools, such as seminaries, to maintain their exemptions, but for most schools- no dice.

This proposal passed the First Amendment without so much as a second glance. The First Amendment of this country protects not only the belief but the exercise of religion, a right that cannot be denied to a man without denying his very nature for “the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature.”

Rick Zbur, executive director of Equality California, justifies the bill by saying that prospective students have a right to know the discrimination regulations at a university. Publicizing these regulations will allow “individuals to protect themselves”. This demand for transparency in higher education is honorable, but misdirected.

Religious institutions don’t covertly disguise themselves in secular garb to attract and retain unsuspecting applicants. To do so would be to subvert their mission of clear and faithful teaching. My own college, Thomas Aquinas College, is completely transparent about its Catholic identity. This is immediately evident to anyone who so much as glances at our campus with its prominent mission-style chapel, or who peeks at the first page of our website, which is filled with generous amounts of Catholic terminology.   Any serious applicant must write an essay answering the prompt, “Thomas Aquinas College is a Catholic college, although one need not be a Catholic to attend. How do you understand the relation between the curriculum and the Catholic character of the College?”

The point is this: you’re not getting in without knowing what you’re getting yourself into.

If the California legislature truly wants to pursue transparency and accountability where it is most needed, it should look towards other, more pressing deficiencies. As ACTA has reported, many California colleges and universities, including the UC system, struggle under the burdens of administrative bloat, rising tuition costs, and in many cases, weak core curricula.  Rather than coming under legislative fire, California religious schools such as ACTA “A” schools Thomas Aquinas College and Saint Katherine College should be treated as models—they uphold the principles of transparency and academic rigor that the California legislature purports to support.

Every summer, ACTA is privileged to have several interns conduct research for the What Will They Learn? project. This is the second in a series of guest blogs written by our interns, who chose topics relevant to higher education. Margaret is a junior at Thomas Aquinas College. She is a working towards her degree in classical liberal arts. She is also founding president of the St. Thomas More Society, a campus chapter of Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

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The directive, mandated for implementation by July 1, 2011, asks states to develop a procedure (if they don’t already have one) to license private educational institutions. The procedure must be a “substantive” one, and if schools do not comply the states are required to take “adverse action” against the institutions. (Under current law, as long as a school is approved by a federally recognized accreditor and is allowed to operate in a particular state, that school will be eligible to receive Title IV financial aid for its students.)

The new rule threatens to introduce another layer of bureaucracy to higher education. And while some states will probably exercise restraint in implementing new rules for universities, the concern is that others may not.

As Hank Brown, former president of the University of Colorado, and Bill Armstrong, president of Colorado Christian University, wrote in a recent op-ed in The Denver Post, “Who can doubt that various interest groups will soon begin to clamor for ideas to be mandated by law as requirements for college classrooms?” Armstrong said in an interview that the new regulations “could set the stage for the renewal of the culture wars” as various groups clamor to determine the content of the curriculum. Should states be involved, Armstrong asks, “in whether colleges teach evolution or intelligent design, or whether a family is a man and a woman or two men?”

Indeed, some states already impose a religious test in deciding which educational institutions receive funds from state coffers. Students at Houghton College and Nyack College, both in New York, are ineligible to receive certain state financial aid because the schools are considered “pervasively sectarian.” So it would be easy to imagine states imposing similar tests for federal financial aid if they were made gatekeepers.

Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education (which represents over 2,000 schools that are public and private, for-profit and nonprofit), says he understands the government’s desire to protect taxpayer dollars and ensure educational quality, but he worries that “state bureaucrats will use the new authority to go well beyond these mandates” and “get into the business of judging curriculum, student admissions, and faculty hiring.”

For religious schools that often have particular approaches to all three, the implications are unsettling. Paul Corts, president of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, wrote in an email that new state regulations “could inadvertently or intentionally be especially onerous to our institutions that are trying to incorporate a Christian/biblical worldview in virtually every aspect of our institutional programs.”

Organizations like ACE and the CCCU registered their objections during the public comment period over the summer (the directives were published in the Federal Register in June), but no response has been issued from the DOE. Rep. Bob Inglis of South Carolina circulated a letter to his colleagues in the House of Representatives on October 22 asking them to urge the DOE to delay the finalization of the rules. He suggested that the “sweeping regulatory remedies…may compromise the integrity, freedom, and flexibility of private colleges and universities across the country.”

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee expressed concern that “increase[d] state government supervision” would reduce the “independence and autonomy” that undergird the strength of the U.S. education system. “Private colleges and universities are currently supervised by their accrediting agencies, and the Secretary of Education approves those agencies,” he said. “If that system needs improvement, we should have that conversation—not hand over the management of private colleges and universities to bureaucrats in Nashville or Sacramento or Boston.”

Jane Glickman, a spokeswoman for the DOE, said she was unaware of these objections. When asked whether there was a chance the department would be reconsidering matters, she responded, “Nothing is going to be delayed.”

There was recent hope among some higher education leaders that the DOE would carve out an exemption for religious institutions to prevent the sort of interference discussed above. In a revised set of regulations released on Thursday, there was a very small exemption. If religious institutions were already exempted from state authorization by state law or the state’s constitution, then that exemption would continue.

But in order to qualify for that exemption, schools must meet the DOE’s new definition of a religious school. According to the DOE, “an institution is considered a religious institution if it is owned, controlled, operated, and maintained by a religious organization lawfully operating as a nonprofit religious corporation and awards only religious degrees or religious certificates including, but not limited to, a certificate of Talmudic studies, an associate of biblical studies, a bachelor of religious studies, a master of divinity, or a doctor of divinity.”

This definition excludes colleges from Georgetown to Notre Dame and from Baylor to Wheaton. Not only are many of the country’s religious schools not maintained or operated by a religious organization, but almost all of them award degrees that are not religious. And a few religious schools operate as for-profit institutions as well.

The almost 900 pages of new regulations released last week (which include comments as well as 82 revisions to the original document) have left many scratching their heads. Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, says she doesn’t understand how the introduction of state authorization would prevent the kind of problems that inspired the regulations in the first place. The fraudulent practices engaged in by a few for-profit schools are already illegal under federal law.

Hartle suggests that the fundamental problem with the regulations is that they fail to recognize how different American colleges and universities are from one another. “The more you try to fit all institutions of higher learning into a single box, the harder it gets to preserve the great diversity that is such a hallmark and strength of our system.”

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