A month after the first meeting of the Trump administration’s new Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, Grand Canyon University, the nation’s largest Christian school, has declared victory on two major long-running legal issues:
- On Friday, the Department of Education announced it was rescinding a $37.7 million fine levied against GCU during the Biden administration.
- On Tuesday, the Internal Revenue Service announced it was ending a long-running Federal Trade Commission investigation into GCU’s nonprofit status.
GCU had long claimed it was being “persecuted” for its Christian worldview, and its president, Brian Mueller, claimed the Baptist school was a victim of “massive government overreach” and had been hounded by “a group of people in D.C., that has the intention to harm us.”
GCU said its legal victories prove its innocence and support its claims of persecution and “lawfare.” Such claims were spread by Fox News, which reported, “The Biden administration is trying to take down the largest Christian university over ‘ideological’ differences.”
The school changed its status in 2004 following a near-bankruptcy to become the nation’s first for-profit Christian college.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Education fined GCU $37.7 million after concluding the school had knowingly lied to graduate students about how much their degrees would cost. DOE said 78% of grad students were required to pay more than $10,000 above advertised amounts to complete their degrees.
The $37.7 million fine was the largest in the DOE’s history levied against the biggest recipient of taxpayer-funded student aid.
“The Phoenix-based private university — with 25,300 on-campus students and 86,000 more in evening and online courses — represents the biggest recipient of federal student aid over the past four years,” reported Christianity Today.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation condemned the Trump administration decision, saying it “reeks of religious favoritism and political interference.”
“The Grand Canyon University fine was dismissed not because the facts changed, but because the administration did,” said RFRA. “This reversal comes despite the overwhelming evidence of financial deception that harmed more than 7,500 students and siphoned over $122 million in federal aid into the university’s coffers.”
The end of the investigation into GCU’s nonprofit status will benefit the school, which started out as a nonprofit Baptist-affiliated college in 1949. From there, it gets complicated.
The nonprofit GCU pays 60% of its tuition and fees to a for-profit company.
- The school changed its status in 2004 following a near-bankruptcy to become the nation’s first for-profit Christian college.
- GCU again switched its status in 2018, becoming a nonprofit once more.
- But the nonprofit GCU pays 60% of its tuition and fees to a for-profit company called Grand Canyon Education, which provides services such as marketing, recruitment and student advising.
- The Federal Trade Commission investigated claims that Grand Canyon Education “operates for the profit of GCE and its investors” in violation of IRS codes. That investigation is now dead.
As BNG reported, the April 22 meeting of Trump’s new Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias “featured only conservative evangelicals complaining about alleged mistreatment by the Biden administration.” Among the complaints were claims that actions taken against GCU and Liberty University were invalid.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Education fined Liberty $14.4 million over campus safety violations around sexual violence.
In April, Brian Mueller, GCU president, participated in a Heritage Foundation forum titled “Reclaiming the Culture of American Higher Education.”
“The media, higher ed and Hollywood has tried to convince most of America that what is being taught at 95% of our universities is what Americans want, and that is absolutely untrue,” Mueller said at the forum. “The majority of Americans don’t want what’s being taught from a worldview perspective in most of these institutions. It wants what we’re teaching in our institutions.”
The Freedom from Religion Foundation sounded an alarm over the message sent by the rescinding of GCU’s $37.7 million fine, saying, “This decision sets a dangerous precedent. If religious institutions know they can violate laws and mislead students without consequence under a sympathetic administration, more fraud will surely follow.”
Related articles:
Second lawsuit charges Grand Canyon University with lying to doctoral recruits
Department of Education levies $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University for lying
Grand Canyon University president calls massive DOE fine ‘government overreach’
Nation’s first for-profit Christian school loses bid to be nonprofit