Hands Off Student Cash

By Steven Menashi | Thursday, August 26, 1999

Scott Southworth is angry. A student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Southworth doesn't seek to limit the activities of political groups he disagrees with on campus, he just thinks he shouldn't have to pay for them. So Southworth is challenging the University in federal court. He makes a simple and resonant point: it's wrong for a college to use its students' dollars to fund ideological activities.

UW-Madison, like Dartmouth College and other schools, charges students a mandatory student activities fee. The fee's proceeds fund the activities of student organizations on campus. During the 1995-96 school year, UW-Madison charged a fee of $165.75 per student per semester.

If you don't pay the fee, you can't graduate, so students hand over the cash. But some students don't like where the money goes. In the 1995-96 year, for example, the Wisconsin Student Public Interest Research Group (WISPIRG), an organization affiliated with Ralph Nader's national advocacy group, received $49,500 in student fees. Of that, WISPIRG sent $2,500 directly to its parent organization, USPIRG, to employ in lobbying Congress. The UW Greens, who received $6,905 in student fees, distributed materials for the Green Party USA. During Ralph Nader's bid for president, the UW Greens circulated campaign literature. The Progressive Student Network, also a recipient of student fees, lobbies the Wisconsin state legislature. Another beneficiary of mandatory student activities fees, the International Socialist Organization, advocates the overthrow of the U.S. government.

More than the radical politics, Southworth found the mandatory student fee policy distasteful. He was forced to financially support political advocacy he found objectionable. So, along with other objecting students, he sued the University of Wisconsin Regents.

'The defendants do not dispute that these and other organizations engage in political and ideological speech,' explained Judge Manion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which decided the case last year. 'Instead, the Regents argue that the First Amendment protects the rights of these organizations to engage in such speech. Of course it does. But the students do not ask that we restrict the speech of any student organization; they merely ask that they not be forced to financially subsidize speech with which they disagree.'

In 1995, the Supreme Court, in Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, held that the University of Virginia committed viewpoint discrimination when it denied funding from mandatory student activity fees to a religious Christian newspaper, even though the funding was available to nonreligious student publications. The First Amendment mandates that, once a public university makes funds available to student organizations, the money must be distributed on a viewpoint-neutral basis.

In her concurring opinion, Justice O'Connor wrote that 'although the question is not presented here, I note the possibility that the student fee is susceptible to a Free Speech Clause challenge by an objecting student that she should not be compelled to pay for speech with which she disagrees.' Indeed, the Court has long acknowledged, as a corollary to the First Amendment, 'the right not to be compelled to subsidize others' speech.' The Court has ruled, for example, that unions may not use mandatory dues to fund political and ideological activities that are not germane to the union's purpose.

The Regents of the University of Wisconsin assert that financing ideological organizations on campus is, in fact, germane to its mission of education.

'Everything is in a sense educational,' noted the Seventh Circuit Court, but 'here germaneness cannot be read so broadly as to include forced funding of private political and ideological groups.'

That the University is educating students, or even advancing an interest in education, by requiring students to finance ideological activities is a dubious contention, the court explained: 'Unlike, for example, a political science class on socialism, the International Socialist Organization is only incidentally concerned with education. Its primary goal is the promotion of its ideological beliefs. The fact that some educational benefit may come from it is secondary, and therefore not sufficiently germane to overcome the objecting students' constitutional rights. The mere incantation of the rubric 'education' cannot overcome a tactic, repugnant to the Constitution, of requiring objecting students to fund private political and ideological organizations.'

Forcing students to fund objectionable political groups, said the court, may even be detrimental to the educational mission of the University: 'In some courses students are likely taught the values of individualism and dissent. Yet despite the objecting students' dissent they must fund organizations promoting opposing views or they don't graduate.'

Students must be forced to fund all advocacy groups, argued the University, or else less controversial speech may result. 'Hateful speech has a place in our society too,' said the Wisconsin Assistant Attorney-General at oral argument.

'That may well be true,' responded the Court, 'but the Constitution does not mandate that citizens pay for it.'

The compelled funding of private speech undermines freedom of belief and limits free speech. As the Seventh Circuit observed, the notion that citizens should not be forced to support views to which they object is even more crucial after the Rosenberger decision.

Under Rosenberger, if a university makes funding available to private organizations, it must do so on a wholly viewpoint-neutral basis: the university would be constitutionally required to finance the Socialists, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazis, and any other group with any viewpoint.

'In essence,' said the court, 'allowing the compelled funding in this case would undermine any right to 'freedom of belief.' We would be saying that students like the plaintiffs are free to believe what they wish, but they still must fund organizations espousing beliefs they reject. Thus, while they have the right to believe what they choose, they nevertheless must fund what they don't believe.' The Seventh Circuit therefore prohibited UW-Madison from using mandatory student fees from objecting students to finance political and ideological groups. The Supreme Court will review the case in October.

The Supreme Court has said that at 'the heart of the First Amendment' lies 'the notion that an individual should be free to believe as he will, and that in a free society one's beliefs should be shaped by his mind and his conscience rather than coerced by the State.' This view is strikingly consonant with the values of liberal education. Today, the line between education and ideological activism is often blurred, as colleges strive to mold the characters and moral conduct of their students. But education and ideological advocacy are not the same things.

The immediate result of Southworth v. Grebe, of course, is that students at public universities will no longer be forced to financially support the propagation of opinions to which they reject.

The decision, though, also clarifies the mission of the university (or at least public universities): 'Funding of private organizations which engage in political and ideological activities is not germane to a university's educational mission,' said the court, and indeed it isn't. The aim of liberal education is to encourage independent thought and to allow students to identify and pursue their own ends.

A free exchange of ideas is a fundamental to the educational mission of the academy. Equally important is a student's freedom to decide which ideas he supports and in which ideas he believes.

Students can't exercise that freedom, of course, when they're bullied into supporting a particular ideology. It's about time colleges reevaluate the student activities fee.

Hands Off Student Cash

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