When it comes to public universities, it can get a bit confusing about who controls what. The legislature allocates the money for higher ed--but it can't control the research, or the teaching, or the views that emerge from both. This can cause confusion, and it's instructive to see what happens in specific cases.

Take Wyoming. The legislature recently balked at a $500,000 increase for a University of Wyoming environmental research institute--because some have reservations about the research that has been coming out of it. It's critical of the state's coal bed methane industry, they say, and this makes it partisan.

That may or may not be true. The point is that this is not for the legislators to decide--they have to keep their funding decisions separated from questions of viewpoint. The governor got that part right when he issued a strong defense of academic freedom: "The university should be a place for all of these ideas to come out," Governor Freudenthal said. "It doesn't mean I'm going to agree with them, but I think they're entitled to articulate them."

He's right -- but he's also not complete. The legislators have legitimate questions about whether the work coming out of this institute is really solid scholarship or whether it's advocacy work masquerading as scholarship: "The lines got blurred because we weren't sure if we were being asked to fund the educational mission of the university or a public policy mission statement," one legislator said. To put it mildly, it would not be unheard of for a university department to be guilty of that sort of sleight of hand. Entire academic fields are founded on exactly that sort of problematic transposition--women's studies, peace studies, ethnic studies, etc. etc. So the concern is a reasonable one.

So what should happen now? I'd welcome readers' thoughts on this. My own sense is that the legislature would not be out of line asking the university trustees to put their minds at ease. And if the trustees can't answer the question--because they have not been attending to matters of intellectual diversity, academic propriety, and scholarly responsibility--they could do worse than to undertake an institutional self-study to assess the intellectual climate of the university's various departments, schools, and institutes. After all, this is the sort of question they should be able to answer. It's a problem if they can't, and it doesn't bode well for future funding decisions at the legislature.

Thoughts?