Legal News

Is UC Trying to Secularize Education? University Gets Favorable Ruling

By Dan Slater

With the back-to-school season nearly upon us, let’s shine a light on education & the law. Last week, we told you about the controversy over the Kamehameha schools’ preference for native Hawaiian students. Today, we bring you a ruling from the Central District of California that deals with whether the University of California can constitutionally deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks are deemed inadequate.

On Friday, Judge James Otero rejected claims by Calvary Chapel Christian School, five Calvary students, and the Association of Christian Schools International that UC’s policies violate the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause, Free Exercise Clause, Establishment Clause and Equal Protection Clause. Judge Otero said UC’s review committees cited legitimate reasons for rejecting the texts - not because they contained religious viewpoints, but because they omitted important topics in science and history and failed to teach critical thinking. Here’s a story from the San Fran Chron, and here’s Judge Otero’s ruling.

As the Chron notes, Otero’s ruling, which focused on specific courses and texts, followed his decision in March that found no anti-religious bias in the UC’s system of reviewing high school classes. Now that the suit has been dismissed, a group of Christian schools has appealed Otero’s rulings to the Ninth Circuit.

Charles Robinson, the UC’s vice president for legal affairs, told the Chron that the ruling “confirms that UC may apply the same admissions standards to all students and to all high schools without regard to their religious affiliations.” What the plaintiffs seek, he said, is a “religious exemption from regular admissions standards.”

Jennifer Monk, a lawyer with Advocates for Faith and Freedom, sees things another way: “It appears that UC is attempting to secularize private religious schools,” she said. “Science courses from a religious perspective are not approved,” she said. “If it comes from certain publishers or from a religious perspective, UC simply denies them.”

So what’s an example of these suspect high school texts? In Friday’s ruling, Otero upheld UC’s rejection of a history course called “Christianity’s Influence on America.” According to a UC professor on the course review committee, the primary text, published by Bob Jones University:

instructs that the Bible is the unerring source for analysis of historical events, attributes historical events to divine providence rather than analyzing human action, evaluates historical figures and their contributions based on their religious motivations or lack thereof and contains inadequate treatment of several major ethnic groups, women, and non-Christian religious groups.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 13, 2008 (boomark / email).