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Government Relations: Improper Activities
By Mark F. Smith
Declining tax revenues are prompting states across the country to cut funding for programs, with a disproportionate impact on higher education. Most state expenditures are in three primary areas: crime, health and welfare, and education, with the bulk of education dollars spent on primary and secondary education. In addition to the problems posed by drastic cuts, some state legislatures have chosen to use the budget process to interfere directly and inappropriately in basic curriculum decisions.
Situations in two states in particular deserve examination. Facing a $700 million overall budget shortfall, legislators in Missouri voted a substantial cut from the University of Missouri system budget, including some symbolic cuts targeting specific academic programs that had raised controversy in the state capital.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City was targeted for a cut of $100,000, an amount considered equivalent to expenditures in support of a political science professor who wrote an article the legislature found objectionable. The article, about sexual politics, did not condemn intergenerational sex forcefully enough for legislative taste. One offended legislator questioned the professor's "thought patterns." Others said that he advocated child molestation, and demanded that he be disciplined or fired. In response, the UMKC administration, the president of the university system, the UMKC faculty senate and the campus's AAUP chapter all issued statements in support of the professor's academic freedom.
The legislature also imposed a $50,000 cut to punish the television station run by the University of Missouri-Columbia journalism program. The station has a policy prohibiting on-air personalities from wearing symbols supporting a cause, and after September 11, 2001, enforced that policy to prohibit the wearing of red, white, and blue ribbons. The original cut was to be $5 million, but was scaled back after legislators realized the station was largely self-supporting, though the university does pay journalism instructors to oversee its operation.
These cuts were symbolic. Though the legislature's intent was made clear, the total amount of the punitive cuts was reduced in conference between the Missouri House and Senate, and it was included in a multi-million dollar reduction in funding to the overall university system budget. The university is free to reallocate funds internally. While the symbolic interference in the internal affairs of the university is an indication of the woeful misunderstanding of the purposes of higher education by the legislators, the practical problem faced by the institution is how to deal with the larger cutbacks in state support.
No such ambiguity exists in North Carolina, where the House of Representatives added a rider to the state budget bill denying state funds for "any course or summer reading program in any religion unless all other known religions are offered in an equal or incremental way." Despite claiming that "this section is not intended to interfere with academic freedom," the House's action directly violated the essence of academic freedom. It targeted a summer orientation reading program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where faculty chose the book Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations, by Michael Sells, for incoming students to read, discuss, and write about in a short paper.
The reading program that legislators objected to has already taken place. Efforts to block the program through the courts failed (for details see the Legal Watch column on page 86). However, should the legislature ultimately adopt the prohibition, the implications are extremely disturbing. The legislature will have inserted its own politically charged judgment into a decision that should be made by college and university faculty themselves.
The AAUP's Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities gives faculty the "primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, and subject matter and methods of instruction." Faculty have the necessary expertise to design programs of education for students. The action of the North Carolina legislature distorts the purposes and realities of education. It mistakes study for advocacy. In practice, a requirement to provide equal time for "any known religion" would be next to impossible to fulfill and thus deny students any study of such controversial topics at all.
Economic circumstances ensure hard times for public higher education for some time to come, and legislative intrusion into curricular matters will only make a bad situation worse.
Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.
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