The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that state higher education officials have no authority over seminaries in Texas, ending several years of litigation over state efforts to restrict the operations of three seminaries in Dallas, Fort Worth and San Antonio.
The high court said the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board violated the constitutional rights of the institutions by preventing them from issuing degrees in theology and calling themselves seminaries.
Writing for the court, Justice Nathan Hecht said state education requirements affecting the institutions “impermissibly intrude” upon religious freedom protected by the U.S. and Texas constitutions.
“Since the government cannot determine what a church should be, it cannot determine the qualifications a cleric should have or whether a particular person has them. Likewise the government cannot set standards for religious education or training,” the court said, citing the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government from establishing an official religion.
There was a good summary of this case post here:
http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2007/09/texas-seminary-wins-challenge-to-state.html#links
(includes links to the relevant opinions).
Personally, I found the dissent to be more persuasive (and I’m generally all in favor of religious institutions and freedom).
Well, that is sort of bizarre. I haven’t read the case and the backstory (which is notoriously different than what the media simplistically portrays.) However, I don’t see how the state could think it could regulate what classified as a “seminary.” They might have some claim to whether or not the institution in question was accredited academically, simply because a non-accredited degree is not worth the paper its printed on. I don’t understand what all the need for lawsuits was about if they weren’t accredited.
A degree from a non-accredited institution is not, of necessity, worthless. The state laws were set up so that the state could filter out “diploma mills” who took money and handed out a degree with little or no classwork. In Texas what is happening is that schools who do not seek state approval are punished merely for not bowing to Caesar even if their graduates are well educated.
I used to work at a junior college in Texas (a state school), when they were going through a self-study and accreditation. Little of the accreditation process was actually geared to whether our graduates could even operate in their field. More concern was shown to the size of the library (which most students rarely visited), student services, and the pay scale of the faculty than the actual education the students received. This school has since been re-approved despite regularly “passing” students who have actually failed courses in order to keep the passing ratio up. These students later graduated with fancy accredited papers but would be in reality be challenged to find their way out of a paper bag. I have since had occasion to hire employees who graduated from “accredited” four year colleges. It is sad and very frustrating to have hired a graduate with a supposed four years or more of “accredited” education beyond high school and still have to teach them how to write at a level they should have mastered in middle school. The current system of accreditation is no indication of actual education received.
Granted, the real diploma mills are a problem and there needs to be a way to weed them out, but there are other schools in this country that are serious about the quality of their students that choose for various reasons not to play the accreditation game. These schools require large amounts of real academic work and turn out graduates who are competent in their fields, which is more than I can say for some “accredited” schools. Those schools deserve to not be lumped in with the others as “diploma mills”. Basically, (to shamelessly appropriate a turn of phrase) we should be looking at the content of their students not the color of their sheepskins.