When the Sheil Catholic Center decided to seek Associated Student Government recognition as a student group last spring, ASG began to question its nearly two-decade-old ban on recognizing religious groups.
“It was one area where we had a lot of questions,” said former ASG President Jonathan Webber, a Weinberg senior. “A lot of groups had been recognized that are on the line between religious and cultural, and some groups came to us and said ‘We’re just as cultural as this group.’ ”
In response, ASG established a six-member committee Fall Quarter to re-examine the ban on religious groups receiving ASG recognition – a prerequisite for obtaining funding through the Student Activities Fee.
Three weeks ago, the committee recommended that the ban, which has existed since 1992, be dropped, stating that “the availability of such experiences helps enrich campus life by providing community members with opportunities for intellectual growth and facilitating mutual understanding and respect.” (View the report here.)
The report’s research and findings were focused on whether ASG was ignoring groups with a right to be recognized, not on questions of funding, said Faisal Choudhury, who wrote the committee’s report.
“The question wasn’t so much getting the money,” the Weinberg senior said. “It was about whether religious groups were adequately represented on campus through ASG.”
The groups that are likely to receive recognition as a result of the policy change do not anticipate any changes in their operations, their leaders said.
Northwestern InterVarsity Christian Fellowship would not change its programming if it received funds from the Student Activities Fee, Multiethnic InterVarsity President Caroline Na said.
“Right now there are a whole bunch of groups whose events I wouldn’t go to that get ASG funding, so I don’t think this would be that much different,” the Communication senior said. “What we talk about is not just what we think but what we want to engage the campus in talking about, and I don’t think that would change.”
The pending change was also not indicative of any broader increase in religious activity on campus, said Jared Satrom, a Cru. student leadership team member.
“I think that ASG noticed that there is a discrepancy between Northwestern University’s policy and that of its peer institutions,” the McCormick senior said. “We weren’t legislating for it or anything – they just noticed that we weren’t getting funding, and we’re viewing it as a nice gesture.”
Though most senators believed in supporting the committee’s recommendation, the Senate chose to postpone the vote in light of concerns brought to ASG’s attention by NU’s Chaplain Timothy Stevens.
Stevens said that the method ASG had proposed to reverse its ban made no mention of the need of religious groups to be acknowledged by the Chaplain’s office before receiving ASG recognition.
“The proposal was just, ‘We’re going to delete the word ‘religious’ from the guidelines’,” Stevens said. “What I think is necessary is a kind of two-step recognition process, so that religious groups will have to be recognized through the chaplain’s office as they always have been.”
Stevens said he was concerned that groups with malicious agendas would attempt to circumvent the requirements in place for recognizing religious groups. To be recognized as a religious group, a group must demonstrate both a following on campus and a positive agenda, he said.
He noted that he deals with applications from “high pressure” religious groups at least once a year.
“They are groups that some people would use the word ‘cult’,” he said. “We want to have a way to say ‘absolutely not.’ ”
There were no objections raised to his proposed changes, and right now the issue is just a matter of finding the right wording, Stevens added.
“The fear is that if it isn’t in writing, in five years we could be somewhere else,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that in the future people would know what the procedure was.”
View the committee’s report on religious groups by clicking here.
