From the Los Angeles Times:
The University of California did not violate students’ freedom of expression and religion when it rejected some classes at a Christian school from counting toward UC admission, a Los Angeles federal judge has ruled.
In a case that has attracted significant attention in religious and academic circles nationwide since it was filed in 2005, the judge upheld the university’s decision to disqualify several classes offered by Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, Calif., for being too narrow or not academically rigorous enough to fulfill UC’s entrance requirements.
The decision will be appealed, said attorney Robert Tyler, who represents Calvary Christian, its student plaintiffs and a group of 4,000 Christian schools nationwide. Tyler said Tuesday that he was disappointed by the ruling but was confident a higher court would find that UC violated the law by rejecting the classes for their religious content. The attorney also said the district judge had applied overly restrictive standards to the bias allegations.
The decision shows that UC “has been totally within its legal rights to apply admission standards across the board to all students and has been doing that in an appropriate way,” university counsel Christopher Patti said Tuesday.
If UC had lost the case, the 10-campus system’s ability to set and control academic standards would have been “seriously undermined” and the door opened to all sorts of admission exemptions, Patti said.
Read the entire article here
