Campus Unity Beginning to Fray?

The tacit agreement that underlies the unified structure of UNC — the understanding that all campuses will speak with one voice to the state legislature through the university administration — might be beginning to fray.

Two political-action committees representing the flagship schools within the University of North Carolina system — North Carolina State University and UNC-Chapel Hill — have been lobbying for unique treatment of their own campuses for some years now. Some of those efforts have been chronicled, and criticized, in the media, but now the PACs are beginning to get some heat from students.

On Feb. 28, at least 20 students from four historically black colleges and universities went to Raleigh to ask legislators to distance themselves from those two committees. One committee is the Citizens for Higher Education, which seeks support for UNC-Chapel Hill. CHE officials say their goal is to ”build political support for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the state’s other research universities.” The other is the Economic Development Coalition 2000, which aims to do the same for N.C. State.

CHE is better known, since it is the second largest PAC in the state, trailing only the political-action committee of the North Carolina Association of Realtors. (CHE also has its own Web site and recently used former Chapel Hill athletic coaches to recruit members in an advertisement in the Carolina Alumni Review.) According to the State Board of Elections, CHE gave $425,000 to legislative candidates in the 2006 election cycle.

Common Cause North Carolina, which promoted the students’ position, said the money went to 109 legislators. For 47 of the legislators, the CHE donation was their largest. NC State’s PAC donated $84,050 in the 2006 election cycle, according to the State Board of Elections.

CHE has had its successes. Its lobbying usually gets the credit for a 2005 state budget provision that changed scholarships for out-of-state students to equal in-state tuition. This means that the same amount of scholarship money can support many more out-of-state students with scholarships — but the taxpayer, not the scholarship donors, must pay the extra costs of tuition. Reps. George Cleveland, R-Onslow, and Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, are leading an effort to overturn the provision.

On the other hand, CHE failed in an effort to obtain freedom for the two flagship campuses to set their own tuition. The Board of Governors must approve all tuition increases.

The students challenging the PACs attend North Carolina Central, Winston-Salem State, North Carolina A&T, and Fayetteville State. They argued that the PACs influence legislators to direct dollars to the two flagships at the expense of other campuses in the system.

Jessica Hill, a student at N.C. Central and president of the campus branch of Common Cause, said at a press conference that the historically black schools “have fewer alumni to finance PACs.” She doesn’t want to reduce quality at UNC-Chapel Hill or N.C. State, but wants the other campuses “to be able to rise to that same high standard through fair access to state resources.”

Rep. Larry Womble, D-Forsyth, said in support of the students that the historically black schools don’t have hotels or businesses on their campuses, as the other schools do. “A blind man can see that there’s not any parity,” he said.

The students want the legislators to sign a statement calling individual campus PACs “unhelpful” and “potentially harmful” and to urge the Board of Governors to bar members from donating to PACs that support individual campuses. There are no restrictions on political activities by members of the Board of Governors.

David Rice, a spokesman for CHE, responded to the criticism with two major points. Rice noted that CHE supports greater funding for many projects that benefit all the schools as well as Chapel Hill, such as increasing faculty salaries throughout the university system.

He also said PACs are vehicles for people to “aggregate their voices and try to make themselves heard.” Any campus can start a PAC. Opposition to the two PACs is tantamount to saying that “anyone but the two largest institutions has the right to free speech.”

The fact that a campus does not have a PAC does not mean that it lacks influence in the legislature, of course. The proposed dental school at East Carolina University, the Center City campus at UNC-Charlotte, and the pharmacy school at Elizabeth City State all show that other campuses are able to wrest substantial funds from the General Assembly.

Controversy is not new to the PACs, especially the CHE. (N.C. State’s PAC has operated in more obscurity.) The News and Observer of Raleigh editorialized in 2006 against the PAC on the grounds that it “insults the parent university system by playing big-money politics” and is “only too willing to cross palms with silver.”

In March, the newspaper wrote an editorial favoring the position taken by the students from historically black colleges and universities, saying that it was an “embarrassment” when members of one public institution think they must “cross the palms of members of another public institution, the legislature, in order to get the attention and support of lawmakers.”

The newspaper also said flatly that the Board of Governors will never agree to any conflict-of-interest rules, “because the members of that board tend to be affluent and often socially connected to the boosters who started [the] PACs.” Each PAC has a member on the board, sources say.

Whatever the merits of the statements, PACs are legal. Stopping people from joining together to make themselves known to legislators would violate rights free speech, petition, and assembly. The students recognize this, but they also want the legislature to acknowledge what one student called the need for “equity for all 16 campuses.”

Jane S. Shaw is the executive vice president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy ([email protected]).