Posted By Karla Dial On April 12, 2012
Original web post at CitzenLink

Rather than allow people who don’t share their faith to hold leadership positions, a faith-based student group at Vanderbilt University announced last month it will become an off-campus ministry at the end of the year.

As a result, the university announced this week that Vanderbilt Catholic will have to change its name.

“Those student groups who choose not to comply with the university’s nondiscrimination policy do forfeit the privileges associated with registered student organization status, and that includes the use of the Vanderbilt name,” Beth Fortune, the school’s spokesperson, told Fox News.

The St. Thomas More Society, another Catholic group, has also announced plans to move off campus rather than comply with the new policy.

In the meantime, 11 Christian groups remaining on campus — for the moment — applied for university recognition last week while refusing to alter their statements of faith. The deadline for such applications to be submitted for the 2012-13 academic year is April 16.

So far, none of the 11 groups has received a response, and there is no specific deadline by which the university must give one, said Justin Gunter, a spokesman for the coalition now calling itself Vanderbilt Solidarity.

“In talking to one of the school officials, they said as long as you’re not officially rejected, you should keep going,” Gunter said. “But if we haven’t heard by mid-summer, that might be when we have to make some calls and say we need to know what’s going on.”

Though most media reports on the school’s new nondiscrimination policy tie it to a gay student who was ousted from one of the Christian student groups for breaking its statement of faith, Gunter said that’s actually a misperception.

“According to Vanderbilt’s administrators, they’ve privately explicitly denied that’s what this policy is about,” he said, citing a videotaped town hall discussion from January. “This is about them saying, ‘We don’t want to allow on campus religious organizations that have these requirements for leadership.’ You won’t find a quote from the administration saying, ‘We’re doing this to protect LBGT students,’ because they know it’s not true, but they’re happy to let that misperception exist.”

Last fall, when discussions about the policy and its effect on student groups began, administrators told students “that even if we’re not registered, we’re still supported and still welcome on campus,” Gunter said. “But the request for Vanderbilt Catholic to change its name would seem to signal that there are very real consequences to not being a registered student group, and that the university isn’t going to be as friendly as it at first indicated.”

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