‘UNPRECEDENTED ASSAULT’: Christian schools made up almost 70 percent of penalties imposed by Biden-Harris education department, new report finds

A new report claims that the Biden-Harris administration has unfairly targeted Christian colleges and universities. 

The American Principles Project (APP) Director of Policy Jon Schweppe released a report on Nov. 18 condemning the White House’s apparent harrying of faith-based institutions of higher education. The report claims that the Biden-Harris administration has “waged an unprecedented assault” on Christian schools. 

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The APP claims that at the center of this campaign is the Department of Education’s Office of Enforcement. This office, according to the report, has the agenda of “shut[ting] down colleges and universities that don’t align with the Administration’s woke agenda.”

Among the key findings of the report is that almost 70 percent “of penalties imposed by the Office of Enforcement have been against Christian institutions and career colleges, even though these schools represent less than 10 percent of college students.”

Other discoveries are that the White House massively swelled the Office of Enforcement’s funds “by nearly 600 percent,” and also issued “record fines” on “two of the nation’s most prominent Christian universities—Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million) and Liberty University ($14 million).” 

Three strategies that the Office uses against Christian schools are: “Impos[ing] massive penalties against leading institutions,” “Harrass[ing] schools operating in good faith with scrutinize-and-fine investigation,” and “cut[ting] off or threaten[ing] colleges’ and universities’ access to Title IV funding.”

APP also notes that the Department of Education has used the Clery Act, a law that makes colleges and universities report crimes on their campuses, to go after Christian schools: “Over the last 10 years, the Department of Education has issued nearly 75 fines for Clery Act violations, totaling $27.5 million in penalties. Twenty of those, more than a quarter, were against Christian colleges and universities. The average fine against a Christian school was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions.”

The report claims there is a clear bias in how the Office of Enforcement treated Christian universities compared with certain secular ones. It states that the office “has almost exclusively targeted Christian universities” while taking no similar measures against other institutions. 

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The report concludes that the “weaponization” of the office, along with other actions taken by the Biden-Harris administration, constitutes a “destructive brand of ‘woke’ authoritarianism.”

One of the Christian schools mentioned in the report, Grand Canyon University in Arizona, has recently won a legal battle in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after the Department of Education tried to block its efforts to become a nonprofit institution. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona previously admitted that he would like to “shut down” the Christian university. 

The Biden-Harris target Christian schools by claiming they engage in “predatory” practices, the report claims. It imposed its multi-million dollar lawsuit on Grand Canyon University, for example, for supposedly ”’not fully informing’ students about the costs of GCU’s doctoral programs on its website,” a charge that the school strongly denies. 

Schweppe told Campus Reform: “For the last four years, Democrats have been busy weaponizing every part of the federal government to target their opponents. While major assaults from agencies like the Department of Justice have taken most of the headlines, we should not ignore similarly corrupt efforts in other agencies as well. As our report details, the Biden-Harris Department of Education has been engaged in a long-running scheme to punish Christian colleges that are ideologically opposed to the left’s agenda. The unfair targeting of these institutions has been egregious, and it needs to stop immediately.”

He continued: “During his first term, President Donald Trump deprioritized the Enforcement Office, and his next administration should eliminate it. APP looks forward to working with the Trump-Vance administration and Republican leaders to end the Democrats’ years-long campaign to control and eliminate faith-based universities once and for all.”

Campus Reform has reached out to the American Principles Project for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.