The Democrat-controlled Senate is not expected to consider the ‘End Woke Higher Education Act’ that recently passed in the House,” reports The College Fix.
The End Woke Higher Education Act was approved by the House in a 213-to-201 vote, largely along party lines:
Higher education expert Adam Kissel told The College Fix his prediction is “so long as Senator Schumer is running the Senate, this bill won’t make it through the Senate.”…
“Things may look different for everyone after November in both the executive and legislative branches and we’ll see which policies can make it through and which ones won’t,” said Kissel, a visiting fellow for higher education reform at the Heritage Foundation and former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Higher Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education.
Rep. Burgess Owens, chairman of the Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee, told The College Fix the legislation is sorely needed, which is why he spearheaded it through the House.
“When accreditation bodies coerce universities to adopt DEI programs, they narrow the scope of acceptable speech, research, and debate to the dogmatic views of the far left,” he said in an emailed statement. “This creates an environment where both faculty and students fear upsetting the DEI crowd with speech that might offend their views. I led the End Woke Higher Education Act through the House to remove politics from the accreditation process and refocus our university system on academic excellence.”
A combination of multiple pieces of legislation, the bill has received praise from both the right-wing Heritage Foundation and the classically liberal Heterodox Academy on account of its efforts to protect universities, faculty, students, protesters, and student organizations from a wide array of political litmus tests.
The first part of the bill, the Accreditation for College Excellence Act of 2024, aims to establish a “[p]rohibition on political litmus tests in accreditation of institutions of higher education.”
The second part, the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, forbids political litmus tests in admissions and several employment processes at universities.
It also requires recipients of Title IV funds, such as Pell grants and Stafford loans, to disclose policies on free expression and free association, ensures protestors and student organizations are treated fairly regardless of ideology, and issues a non-binding call for non-sectarian institutions to adopt principles that emphasize a “commitment to freedom of speech and expression.”
Kissel says that “advancing this policy would be a first modest step towards accreditation reform. For many years observers of higher education have seen abuses of power by institutional accreditors. What this bill does is advance a policy that we have advocated for which would prevent accreditors from imposing DEI requirements on institutions as a condition of their recognition by the Department of Education for federal student aid purposes. What is great about this bill on the free speech side is that it gets the balance exactly right between full free speech and conduct that goes beyond the bounds of free expression.”
But the bill “will likely die in the Senate at the end of the current session,” reports The College Fix.
“The Democrat-controlled Senate and Senate leadership are not going to bring up a bill that’s called the ‘End Woke Higher Education Act,’” notes Kissel.
