A proposed rule change would rescind Trump-era protections for religious freedom on campuses, potentially subjecting students to costly and ruinous litigation.
A proposed rule change would rescind Trump-era protections for religious freedom on college campuses, potentially subjecting students to costly and ruinous litigation.
T he Department of Education (DOE) is sacrificing religious freedom at the altar of indifference. That’s bad news for the future of America.
For the next two weeks, the DOE will be accepting feedback on a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking” issued last month that would rescind a 2019 Trump-era executive order that denies federal funding to colleges and universities that restrict the activities of religious organizations on campus. In their notice, the DOE claims that the rule is “unduly burdensome” — a confusing novelty that is unnecessary for the protection of students’ First Amendment rights. Instead, they propose a return to the “longstanding practice” of judicial deference on this issue.
While it’s true that the DOE’s involvement in First Amendment disputes has potential pitfalls, the executive branch has a constitutional duty to enforce the existing law that protects students’ First Amendment rights, making this deference a case of executive indifference, not executive restraint. Through this indifference, the DOE will allow campuses across the nation to continue to deny students the right to exercise their religious beliefs.
This is especially troubling because colleges serve as one of our nation’s main forums for meaningful discourse and thoughtful inquiry. As a result, campuses have been a battleground for First Amendment issues for over 50 years. While much of the fighting has centered on free-speech restrictions, administrators have also set their sights on religious freedom, with many religious student organizations coming under fire in recent years for alleged discrimination.
One such attack hit particularly close to home for me.
My university, the University of Iowa, was sued by a group of students in late 2017 and again in mid-2018 after administrators deregistered two religious student organizations — Business Leaders in Christ (BLinC) and the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. The university justified its decision by claiming that the organizations violated the school’s “Human Rights Policy” when they made leadership positions within their respective organizations contingent on the affirmation of the organizations’ statements of faith. Fortunately, both cases were decided in favor of the claimants in 2021, and Iowa federal courts ordered the University of Iowa to pay nearly $2 million to the organizations for the administration’s blatant religious discrimination and disregard for First Amendment jurisprudence.
One might argue that these cases prove that the executive branch isn’t needed to resolve disputes regarding religious freedom. After all, the claimants went to court, won, and were awarded compensation. But American students shouldn’t need to rely on a costly litigation process to live out their faith on campus. While the judiciary is well-suited to redress grievances, the executive branch plays an important role in preventing the violation of students’ freedoms from happening in the first place. The Iowa judiciary may have vindicated the claimants in these cases, but only years after the incidents occurred — long after many of the students involved had left campus for good. To prevent more of these sorts of incidents, it is essential that the executive branch take up its responsibility to uphold religious freedom by incentivizing its protection on campuses. After all, the University of Iowa is not the only university with a propensity for restricting students’ rights.
According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), as of 2023, almost 14 percent of major public institutions of higher education (IHE) maintain policies that substantially restrict students’ First Amendment rights. Another 71 percent allow for the suppression of these rights. And that’s just accounting for the institutions that have restrictive policies in their written regulations, not those that censor students or promote self-censorship beyond what is expressly written in the student handbook.
While these policies are not limited to issues of religious freedom, they do represent a rampant disregard for students’ broader First Amendment rights on the part of IHE administrators. And though the DOE claims that it is dedicated to “prohibiting discrimination and ensuring equal access to education,” its recent decision to rescind Trump’s executive order without proposing a replacement reflects a lack of real commitment. Without executive enforcement, students’ religious freedoms will remain as vulnerable to administrative encroachment as they were at my university.
Religious freedom is, at its core, a manifestation of the freedom of conscience, the people’s right to express their closely held beliefs, religious or otherwise. The defense of this right is essential to the preservation of a free society, as it ensures citizens can make choices in accordance with their personal convictions. This makes violations of religious freedom committed by IHEs an especially disturbing problem in urgent need of a solution.
College is more than job training, tailgating, and partying. College is meant to be a place where students can learn to confront the chaos of the unknown with the truth. Where they can reconcile their values to an understanding of the good. And where they can cultivate their incarnation of that reconciliation. But if our IHEs do not protect students’ freedom of conscience, then they betray their purpose and doom their students to be little more than mouthpieces for someone else’s beliefs, unable to think for themselves or navigate the world around them.
While Trump’s executive order may very well have been an imperfect solution to this serious problem, ignoring the problem is no solution at all. The DOE should not rescind the Trump-era order unless they have an effective solution ready to replace it.