Students are riled up at Vanderbilt University, but not in anticipation of a basketball game.
Under a new nondiscrimination policy at Vanderbilt, members of belief-based student organizations will no longer be able to make group leadership decisions using belief-based criteria. The policy now dictates that “membership in registered student organizations is open to everyone and that everyone, if desired, has the opportunity to seek leadership positions.” This is to say that a Christian organization cannot require its officers to be Christian, a Muslim organization cannot require its officers to be Muslim, and the College Republicans cannot require their officers to be Republicans. If they do, they are engaging in prohibited discrimination, and their organizations face a loss of recognition.
The sentiments of this policy were seen in practice in the fall of last year, when Vanderbilt’s chapter of the Christian Legal Society was threatened with a loss of recognition after Vanderbilt investigated and discovered that CLS’s constitution included a provision that officers lead the group in Bible study and prayer. According to Vanderbilt, this provision was unacceptable discrimination because it “would seem to indicate that officers are expected to hold certain beliefs.”
Unsurprisingly, the new policy has Vanderbilt’s religious and political student organizations up in arms. A group of students calling themselves Restore Religious Freedom at Vanderbilt has begun an all-out campaign against the new regulations, taking out radio ads in the Nashville area and starting an online petition.
And they are not alone. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I work, along with 23 members of the United States Congress, the national Christian Legal Society, Vanderbilt law professor Carol Swain, Roman Catholic Bishop David Choby of Nashville, and many others, have expressed concerns that this policy severely infringes on the rights of Vanderbilt students.
Last Tuesday night, the Vanderbilt administration held a town hall meeting to discuss the new policy. Last Friday, FIRE wrote an open letter to Vanderbilt Chancellor Zeppos raising some questions that would help the Vanderbilt community realize some of the policy’s greater implications and perhaps unintended consequences:
- If one of the leaders of Vanderbilt’s Muslim Students Association were to convert to Christianity, is the group required to maintain that person in his or her leadership role despite the fact that he or she is no longer Muslim?
- Vanderbilt informed the Christian Legal Society that its requirement that student leaders “lead Bible studies, prayer, and worship” was against the policy because it implied that these leaders must hold certain religious beliefs. How do you suggest religious groups at Vanderbilt fulfill their purposes without leaders who can accomplish such core tasks of religious leadership?
- If a member of the College Republicans joins the College Democrats in order to discover their plans for political activism and report those plans back to the College Republicans so as to thwart them, do the College Democrats have any way to stop him or her?
- Under this policy, must a conservative or liberal college paper accept editors or publish columnists who disagree with, mock, or denigrate its political views?
Although last Tuesday night’s town hall meeting was only open to Vanderbilt students, staff, and faculty, multiple outlets are reporting that Vandy’s responses to questions similar to those listed above were at best vague, and at worst clearly evasive. In an interview on Fox & Friends, Professor Swain, who attended the meeting, noted that the university has changed its rhetoric surrounding the policy from describing it as a “nondiscrimination” policy to an “all-comers” policy—this is to say that any student can join and be a leader in any group, even those with traditionally selective membership.
The other interviewee, Vanderbilt College Republicans President Stephen Siao, mentioned that of the more than 200 students who were let into the building, approximately 95% of them were against the policy. There were as many if not more students outside who were not let in due to room capacity issues.
Of the questions listed above, Vanderbilt did reportedly succeed in addressing one issue: the routes for resolution student group members would have if their organization were to be co-opted by other students under this new policy. The Vanderbilt administrators suggested that student groups could seek dissolution, and then reassemble and select new leadership. This is extremely burdensome, and there’s no guarantee the same problem would not happen again. Not to mention the other implications for dissolving and restarting a student group, including but not limited to: reductions in student fee funding; general awareness of the group’s existence (which becomes more and more difficult with volatility in recognition); and the work required to regain student group recognition.
The implications of this policy involve serious changes to the way Americans expect organizations to function. Essentially, the new policy creates myriad troublesome issues for students in the hopes of addressing one issue that’s troublesome for administrators, with the likely to be counterproductive and just plain weird (imagine if the Weekly Standard were required to let Maureen Dowd attend editorial meetings). Let’s hope that the town hall meeting finally helps alert the entire Vanderbilt community of exactly what their administrators are getting them into.
Lyzi Diamond is a Program Associate for the Campus Freedom Network at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
