President Biden has once again attacked Grand Canyon University, the largest Christian college in the United States. This time, the Federal Trade Commission alleges that the university has engaged in illegal telemarketing and deployed “deceptive” advertising tactics.
As per the New York Post, the complaint alleges that the Arizona-based university misled potential doctoral students about the length of its accelerated program, deceptively marketed itself as a nonprofit and made illegal calls to prospective students who had requested not to be contacted:
The FTC said in a press release it filed suit in federal court against GCU, its marketer Grand Canyon Education, Inc. and its president and CEO Brian Mueller, claiming the defendants used deceptive advertising and engaged in illegal telemarketing.
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“Grand Canyon deceived students by holding itself out as a non-profit institution and misrepresenting the costs and number of courses required to earn doctoral degrees,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “We will continue to aggressively pursue those who seek to take advantage of students.”
The complaint accuses GCU of violating the FTC Act and the Telemarketing Sale Rules, and is asking the U.S. District Court in Arizona to force GCU to compensate consumers for the alleged violations and to prohibit the university “from further violations of the law.”
The university has faced attacks since it switched to nonprofit status. University officials claim that multiple federal agencies have coordinated their “fishing expeditions” to unjustly target the institute of higher learning for political reasons that are not entirely clear.
They further allege that the government is retaliating against the university for its 2021 lawsuit against the Education Department.
“They weren't accusing us of anything specifically, but they were requesting thousands and thousands and thousands of files, documents, etc., and they looked for what they thought they could find,” Grand Canyon University President Brian Mueller told the Washington Examiner earlier this fall.
