It’s been half a year since the Approaching the Qur’an controversy erupted at UNC-Chapel Hill, and I still see little indication that university leaders, or their leaders in North Carolina’s political class, really understand what it was all about.
Admittedly, their delusion was facilitated by some intemperate remarks by UNC critics, including some of the state lawmakers involved in an ill-advised legislative move to suspend the reading assignment. Still, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see that the decisions of a state institution, overwhelmingly using taxpayer dollars, do not enjoy the same degree of independence that private institutions rightly exercise.
A good example of what I’m talking about occurred this weekend at another UNC campus, Western Carolina University in Cullowhee. As reported by the Asheville Citizen-Times, the “Women’s Agenda Task Force” of WCU’s Public Policy Institute met Saturday to develop an agenda they plan to press in the General Assembly this year. After presentations on how “organized religion” oppresses women and government at all levels fails to fund sufficient welfare programs, the delegates to this confab – whom the newspaper oddly described as “more than 110 women and a few men” – met in smaller groups to develop agenda items. Shockingly, they concluded that more taxpayer money was needed.
In addition to being asinine, and astonishingly ill-time given the state’s impending fourth year of budget deficits, the WCU meeting was wholly inappropriate. Though the story doesn’t reveal the specific financing of the university’s Public Policy Institute, its “Women’s Agenda Task Force,” and its Women’s Studies program from which some of the participating scholars came, I am confident that we, the taxpayers of North Carolina, paid for at least a good chunk of this endeavor. Basically, we were compelled, at the point of a gun, to fork over wealth that we created through our labor and initiative so that a government institution could hold a meeting of political activists to devise schemes for compelling us to fork over more of our wealth.
Public universities properly can, and inevitably will, be the site of political activism. There is nothing wrong with the Young Democrats, the College Republicans, the Libertarians, the Greens, the Democratic Socialists of America, and, yes, even women’s studies nincompoops convening on campuses. There is nothing wrong with students and faculty members debating the issues of the day; indeed, it doesn’t happen enough. Furthermore, on private campuses it would be nice to see some fairness and balance, but it isn’t mandatory. Reasonable people know that you cannot expect to experience a broad spectrum of political discourse at a conservative Baptist bible college or, say, left-leaning Duke University.
But given the preponderance of taxpayer funding at public universities – even with recent tuition increases, students and their families pay only about a quarter of the cost of their undergraduate educations – there are some common-sense rules that should apply. My preference would be to prohibit any tuition, fee, or tax money from flowing to political activities, organizations, or publications on public campuses. That means events pay for themselves through user fees or private grants, including rent and promotion. As we seem to be far removed from this policy, at the very least all views must be treated and funding equally, which doesn’t happen now.
The Qur’an controversy happened not because students were required to read about Islam, one of the world’s greatest religious and cultural forces, but that they were required to read a book that failed to provide them with a relevant, useful, and fair treatment of the subject (I thought book in question was fine as a piece of literature, by the way, though it was completely ill-suited to the task the university said it was trying to accomplish). In the case of WCU’s “Women’s Agenda Task Force,” there is simply no defense for the idea of using university resources and personnel to try to determine political and legislative outcomes – even if the content had been truly scholarly, rather than (apparently) laughable.
There are many reasons why the UNC system may face trouble in the legislature in 2003. Some are described today on CarolinaJournal.com. But this episode typifies the lot.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.