SANTA MONIA MOUNTAINS : Panel OKs Bill Targeting Soka
The state Senate Education Committee on Wednesday approved on a 6-0 vote a bill aimed at making it difficult for Soka University in the Santa Monica Mountains to bill itself as a university.
Under the measure, a school calling itself a university or college would have to be a public institution, an accredited school or a nonprofit religious institution with courses limited to the principles of the church.
Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) told the committee that he was seeking the measure “to nudge one institution, Soka University, to get its accreditation in a timely manner.”
But Jeff Ourvan, a Soka spokesman, said the measure would not affect his school because it is hoping to obtain state accreditation in a few months as it expands its language courses.
Soka provides English-language classes to about 100 students from the school’s Tokyo campus.
In 1986, the school began buying land near Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas.
Hayden’s measure, which already has cleared the Assembly, now goes to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
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