The College Fix

The Democrat-controlled Senate is not expected to consider the “End Woke Higher Education Act” that recently passed in the House with moderate bipartisan support, but observers remain optimistic that the effort to pass some form of higher ed reform will eventually see success in coming sessions.

The End Woke Higher Education Act was approved by the House in September with a vote of 213 to 201. Four Democrats voted alongside their Republican colleagues in support of the bill.

But 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.”

However, he said, “there are a lot of pro-free speech Democrats and it isn’t completely outlandish to think the bill can come up next time with enough Democrat support to pass in both houses.”

“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.”

“Advancing this policy would be a first modest step towards accreditation reform,” Kissel said. “For many years observers of higher education have seen abuses of power by institutional accreditors.”

“What this bill does,” he said, “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,” added Kissel, “is that it gets the balance exactly right between full free speech and conduct that goes beyond the bounds of free expression.”

Yet, despite the positive changes in higher education the bill seeks to enact, the expert consensus is that it will likely die in the Senate at the end of the current session.

“The Democrat-controlled Senate and Senate leadership are not going to bring up a bill that’s called the ‘End Woke Higher Education Act,’” said Kissel.

Heterodox Academy’s Joe Cohn agreed, saying in a webinar that “titling it the End Woke Higher Education Act itself made a political statement” and rendered it difficult for Democrats to support, regardless of whether they agree with the bill’s content.

“It’s hard, you know, as a Democrat, to add your name to that branding and framing of the issues,” he said.

Beyond branding and framing though, Kissel said, “Whatever the name was going to be…the left is down on free speech today.”

As an example, Kissel noted how John Kerry recently made the news for criticizing the First Amendment as an impediment to the regulation of disinformation.

Cohn, in the Heterodox Academy webinar, noted that without speculating about the motives of individual senators, there likely are some Democrats that believe the First Amendment already provides the kinds of protections the bill offers or that claims that free speech in higher ed is under attack are greatly exaggerated.

He added, it could just be party politics in an election year.

Yet neither Kissel nor Cohn believe the reforms sought by the bill are completely lost.

Given the bill is an amalgamation of different bills proposed by different representatives, Kissel noted, certain portions of the bill may be reintroduced separately depending on who’s still in office and which pieces they favor.

Additionally, according to Cohn, the bill is not perfect. In a September article, he detailed how he and the Heterodox Academy believe it could provide additional protections of academic freedom and that its proposed enforcement mechanism – which links Title IV fund eligibility to compliance – may be overly aggressive given that consistent non-compliance on the part of an institution could destroy the institution and leave many students without financial aid.

With additional time, Cohn argued, some of these perceived problems could be remedied.

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