Editor's note: This column is a response to a column supporting DeVos's nomination, published by The State Press on Feb. 5, 2017.
Students are right to be concerned about the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Her political contributions and lack of experience make her a threat to our university, which is “measured not by whom we exclude, but rather by whom we include and how they succeed.”
DeVos is a flagship representative of anti-First Amendment dominionist ideology working its way through the U.S. political system. Dominionism seeks to put hardline Christians fully in charge of every aspect of American life, particularly education.
Dominionist DeVos represents an attack not only on our ability to have free exercise of religion, but also an attack on Title IX, protecting students from sex discrimination. Further, DeVos could challenge our basic ability to pay for school through the Federal Student Loan program.
DeVos’s educational experience primarily comes through her advocacy for charter and religious schools receiving state education dollars, which by necessity means less funding for the overwhelming majority of students in public schools.
At the university level, this is of concern, as private schools are precisely those driving the bubble in tuition costs, with public universities continuing to represent the most cost-effective education for students nationally. DeVos’s position is unlikely to reverse the student loan bubble cited as grounds for Department of Education reorganization in an earlier column from the State Press.
By providing more dollars to the schools already inflating their costs well beyond those of state universities like ASU, DeVos will willingly encourage the ballooning tuition to, in her words, “advance God’s Kingdom” through schools like Liberty University.
Her interest in expanding religious schools at the expense of public students goes further than giving them more money. Her Department of Education has already brought Jerry Falwell, Jr. onto a higher education advisory board.
As Liberty University’s president, Jerry Falwell, Jr. is the heir to a vast network of contacts responsible for the partisanship of today’s Evangelical movement. This fusion of hyper-partisanship with religious sentiment was started in the 1960s to respond to forced desegregation of schools like Bob Jones University, which would have lost its federal funding for not allowing for students of color to enter into romantic relationships with white students.
As with the segregation fight in the 1960s, the advisory board is likely to seek to expand what is permissible from an accredited educational institution.
Through her links — including ten thousand dollars of donations from her Amway-derived fortune — to organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), DeVos has made it clear what the expansion of permissible actions by universities means.
DeVos has tried to distance herself from FIRE’s moves to make it harder to go after perpetrators of sexual assault on campus. Yet FIRE also is working to perpetuate rape culture by eliminating conversations on problems with language like “I’d tap that,” because the organization considers the verbal equivalent of public masturbation to be an innately important part of the masculine experience.
But DeVos doesn’t just support FIRE. She also supports a wide array of conservative culture war organizations through the provision of DeVos Dollars, whose latest exchange rate runs $200,000,000 to one Secretary of Education confirmation. These groups seek to weaken other Title IX provisions.
Title IX doesn’t only make certain that female students receive protection from heinous crimes. It also protects LGBT students from discrimination, which enrages other DeVos Dollar recipients like the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, both of which consider the privilege to exist for LGBT Americans as an intrusion on religious liberty.
DeVos did not defend her work with these organizations during the nomination process. Instead, she demonstrated her lack of knowledge on what the Department of Education even does. Her comments show a profound lack of preparation, which led the Arizona Student Association (ASA) to denounce her accession to the position.
“Our board has decided to stand against the confirmation. We didn’t feel that she was qualified to lead the Department of Education. Our board voted on that unanimously, because she is in charge of our student loan program and with her inexperience, we felt her nomination was a disservice to the students of Arizona,” Michael Martinez, deputy director of the ASA, said.
ASA was right to denounce DeVos. Her views are dangerous for student safety, dangerous for student finances and dangerous for the very basis of a non-sectarian public education. But thank God that the most disadvantaged of all American religious groups will have an underdog billionaire champion in that most drained of swamps.
ASU must fight against DeVos’s extremist agenda during her tenure as Secretary of Education.
Reach the columnist at benjamin.steele@asu.edu or follow @blsteele17 on Twitter.
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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