This act ensures that public colleges receiving federal funds cannot deny religious student groups the same rights, benefits, and privileges granted to other student organizations.
James Lankford
Senator
OK
The Equal Campus Access Act of 2025 ensures that public colleges receiving federal funding must grant religious student organizations the same rights, benefits, and privileges afforded to all other student groups. This prevents institutions from denying resources or penalizing religious groups based on their beliefs, practices, speech, leadership selection, or conduct standards. Essentially, the bill mandates equal treatment for all student organizations on campus to maintain federal funding eligibility.
Campus Access Act Ties Federal Funding to Equal Treatment for Religious Student Groups
The new Equal Campus Access Act of 2025 is short, but its impact on public universities could be huge. Simply put, this bill tells public colleges that if they want federal funding under this Act, they can’t deny any right, benefit, or privilege to a religious student group if that benefit is offered to other student groups. The protection is specifically triggered if the denial is based on the religious group’s beliefs, practices, speech, leadership choices, or “standards of conduct” (SEC. 2).
The Campus Club Conundrum
Think of this as a forced equality mandate for college clubs. If the university gives the Chess Club free use of a meeting room, or the Debate Team a budget for travel, they must give the same resources to the Christian Student Fellowship or the Muslim Student Association. That part makes sense and protects religious expression. The complexity comes from the specifics. Many religious groups require their leaders to adhere to specific tenets of faith—for example, only allowing members who share their beliefs or conduct standards to hold leadership positions. Currently, many public universities have strict non-discrimination policies that require all recognized student groups to allow any student to be a leader, regardless of their background or personal beliefs, as long as they pay dues. This bill essentially forces the university to make an exception for religious groups on the basis of their “leadership selection” or “standards of conduct” (SEC. 2). For a university trying to enforce a blanket non-discrimination policy across campus, this is a major conflict.
The Cost of Compliance
For students and parents, this bill introduces a tricky scenario. On one hand, it ensures that religious students aren't marginalized or denied access to basic campus resources. On the other, it puts public colleges in a tough spot: either they compromise their existing non-discrimination rules regarding leadership roles—rules often designed to protect students from exclusion—or they risk losing federal funding tied to this Act. If a university decides to protect its existing policies and forgo the federal money, that funding gap could affect everything from student services to research grants. This is the classic policy dilemma: protecting one group's rights potentially creates friction with the established policies designed to protect others. The vagueness around terms like “standards of conduct” also means universities could face lawsuits trying to figure out where the line is drawn, which means higher legal costs that ultimately get passed down to students through tuition and fees.