This is part two of my SFSU-inspired blog series on student groups. In part one, I discussed how the constitutional right of freedom of association protects students who want to form groups based on common interests or beliefs, and I explained how it is that the right of such private groups to define and delimit their membership tends to trump anti-discrimination law--even at public universities. In this blog, I will discuss how student groups are funded and explain what students and parents can do to make sure the fees they pay don't go to support groups they find personally objectionable. "Freedom of Dissociation," as I like to call it, is potentially a very useful strategy for students at schools like SFSU and Berkeley, where partisan campus groups such as General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) promote views and behave in ways that many other students find to be politically misguided, physically threatening, and morally repugnant.

First the history:

In the beginning, student activities fees were assessed to pay for amenities all students could use and enjoy. They were the invention of students themselves, and they were intended to create a fund out of which students could purchase good and services that would benefit most, if not all, students. When mandatory student fees were first assessed during the late nineteenth century, they were used to pay for such uncontroversial items as caps and gowns for graduating seniors and communal playing fields. Sometimes they even went to pay for necessities, such as lighting and lab fees. This was the case up through the 1950s.

But during the 60s, things changed. During that decade, student activities fees, like everything else on American campuses, became the subject of political debate and struggle. Some student activists saw the fees as a potential means of furthering their chosen causes. They ran for student office, and once there they and their fellow elected activists transformed the meaning and the dispensation of mandatory student fees. What once went to pay for services all students could potentially use began during the 1960s to be used to back special interest groups.

By the end of the 60s, student groups had become politicized. In addition to hobbyist clubs organized around shared interests--chess, ballroom dancing, underwater basketweaving--more and more student groups were forming on the basis of political, ethnic, and sexual affiliation. And, as more and more student groups formed around political stances and politicized concepts of group "identity" (whether racial or sexual), the nature of "student activities" underwent a profound shift. Advocacy was the primary activity of these new groups.

It hardly needs saying that most of the advocacy groups funded by student activities fees mirrored the political leanings of the activist student officers who allocated their funds: just as it was left-leaning students who saw student fees as a chance to back selected political and moral causes, so it was left-leaning student groups who received a disproportionate amount of the money thus dispensed. The result: the institutionalization of leftist politics as a norm of campus life.

It was only a matter of time before some students began objecting to the fact that their mandatory student fees were going to fund groups whose political and moral beliefs ran counter to their own. Some students chafed so much that they sued for the right not to support certain student groups. And thus did that seemingly innocuous thing, the student activities fee, become the concern of the courts.

Now for the law....

There is a surprising amount of law on the subject of how student fees are to be assessed and distributed. Cases have been coming before the courts--and occasionally making their way up to the Supreme Court--since the 1970s. The majority of these suits have concerned the PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups). Initially, student officers at certain state schools were using a percentage of the student activities fund to support the PIRGs' lobbying activities. Over the years, students at Rutgers, SUNY Albany, and UC Berkeley have sued for the right not to pay fees into these advocacy groups, and they have won. The details of the cases differ, but the consensus among the courts was that state schools could not legally make students pay into a fund that would be used to finance partisan political activities.

In addition to the PIRG suits, there have been two landmark Supreme Court cases surrounding student fees. The first is Rosenberger v Rectors of the University of Virginia (1995), and concerns freedom of association (the subject of my June 27 blog). In this suit, the Supreme Court ruled that the University of Virginia violated the First Amendment rights of conservative student journalists when it denied funding to a Christian student paper because of its "religious" viewpoint.

The second case is Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth (2000), and concerns what I call freedom of dissociation. In this suit, the Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to opt out of paying fees if those fees are being distributed in a discriminatory (i.e., non-viewpoint neutral) manner. According to the Court in a concurrent case, Fry v. Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, the University had no checks in place to ensure that student officers were allocating fees in a neutral manner; therefore, the finding in Southworth was that students who did not want to pay into the system had a right to opt out. Like Rosenberger v. Rectors, the Southworth case was brought by conservative Christian students who felt their rights of free expression and free association were being violated by a partisan campus climate: the specific groups the Southworth plaintiffs did not want to fund were, predictably, left-wing groups (particularly the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Campus Center) dedicated to promoting lifestyles and beliefs that were totally contrary to the students' deepest convictions.

Taken together, the cases clarify several things about how the funding of student groups must work at public colleges and universities. They show that a group's viewpoint cannot be the criterion for denying a group funding; they show that schools must use viewpoint neutral criteria for determining which groups get funded and how much money they get; they show that if a school abides by viewpoint neutral funding criteria, it can make all students pay a mandatory activities fee; and they show that where schools do not abide by viewpoint neutral funding criteria, all bets are off--underfunded groups can potentially sue for discrimination and individual students can refuse to pay activities fees.

Now for the strategy:

Many American colleges and universities don't even come close to abiding by viewpoint neutral criteria when allocating funding to student groups. Choose any old campus at random, and odds are you will find well-heeled Black Student Unions and Queer Alliances and MEChA chapters. Odds are, too, that conservative and religious student groups will be comparatively poorly funded--if they receive funding at all. David Horowitz has documented the phenomenon of campus partisanship extensively, as has Christina Hoff Sommers (see also my May 7 blog). It's basically an established, if underappreciated, fact that student funding is a very partisan business on American campuses--despite the anti-discrimination laws and the court rulings that mandate otherwise.

So....to make a long blog short, if you attend a public college or university and there are student groups on your campus that you just do not want your money to support, do some research. Look into how your school distributes its funding for student groups (at SFSU, for example, this money is distributed by Associated Students). Look at the criteria for funding, and look at actual funding patterns. If you can prove that your school is not distributing funding in a fair way--and at many public schools this is a point just waiting to be made--then you've got yourself a case. You've got the law on your side. You can refuse to pay fees that fund campus groups whose politics and/or morals conflict with your beliefs.

A small victory, perhaps, but hardly a meaningless one. You will be honoring your conscience. And you will be showing your school that it needs to clean up its act. And, if enough students act along the same lines, certain groups (SFSU's GUPS comes to mind, as do Berkeley's SJP and UCSD's MEChA) just may find themselves pressed for funds--not because they have been officially defunded (recall that they can't be defunded for viewpoint alone), but because they have been de facto defunded--because so many individuals have made it a matter of conscience to refuse to fund student hate groups.

Higher ed needs some massive ethical overhauling. Taking the terms of student funding seriously may be one way to gain leverage with schools where political double standards reign, and where, as a result, violence seems to be bubbling ever closer to the surface.