At the College of Charleston, a business professor has drawn criticism for offering course credit to students who worked on local mayoral candidate Jimmy Bailey's campaign. Students were given two extra credit points per hour for working at an after-hours phone bank affiliated with Bailey's campaign. They could earn up to ten total points for phoning local citizens and asking a series of leading questions about the current mayor's performance (the insinuation was that it is bad) and Bailey's opposing platform (the insinuation was that it is good). The survey the students were administering was written by Charleston business professor Mark Hartley, who is co-chairing Bailey's campaign and who once chaired Charleston County's chapter of the Republican Party. Over two hundred people were surveyed by twelve of Hartley's students. The Post and Courier article reporting this little academic fiasco does not say how many students were enrolled in Hartley's class, how much credit they got, and how much that credit enhanced their grades.

There is a familiar ring to events in Charleston. One thinks of Citrus College adjunct speech professor Rosalyn Kahn, who last winter gave extra credit to students who wrote letters to the President opposing the war and refused credit to students who wanted to write letters supporting the war. One thinks, too, of the Dartmouth departments of sociology and Spanish and Portuguese, who voted to use departmental funds to finance a student trip to Washington to protest the war, and of the Duke cultural anthropology department, which used departmental funds to take out an anti-war ad in the student paper.

The Duke administration immediately recognized what the Citrus College and Dartmouth adminstrators did not: that the federal tax code explicitly prohibits the school or any of its divisions from financing political campaigns. Individual members of the anthro faculty wound up paying for the ad out of pocket. The Dean of Charleston's business school also seems to recognize that Hartley has mixed academics and politics in an ethically and potentially legally troubling way. His position, according to the Post and Courier, is that while "Hartley's actions did not rise to a disciplinary offense," nonetheless "the political nature of the project was problematic." A quote: "We can question whether sound judgment was used. ... As a state institution, we take a nonpartisan point of view."

Though Hartley has acknowledged that he went too far, members of the incumbent mayor's campaign are milking this one for all it's worth. A spokesman noted that Hartley had most likely used student's paid tuition time to conduct reportable election work. "Compensating students for political work is unethical," he said. "That seems like a step beyond the bounds of a public employee." He went on to note that Hartley would probably have to declare the monetary value of the student's work as an "in-kind campaign contribution." He did not offer suggestions as to how the rest of the students in Hartley's class could be compensated for the missed opportunity to earn course credit. Clearly there are problems with giving them comparable credit for working on the incumbent's campaign. Perhaps Hartley could make up the disparity by offering his students credit for polling faculty members about the ethics of rewarding students for supporting their professors' political views. Given the rampant professorial confusion itemized above, I would think such a survey would yield very telling results.