Students at UC Berkeley are up in arms. The cause du jour? They might have to cover their own political expenditures when they participate in state or local political activities. The SF Chronicle, obviously sympathetic to the students, titles the article "UC officials want student governments politically neutral."
Could the Chronicle headline really be true? I was pretty surprised to see it. While I wouldn't put it past CA's intrusive governmental bodies to silence someone's speech, this seemed to be going over the line. In fact, the headline is extremely misleading - if you read the whole article, you'll discover that the issue emerged when UC Berkeley set aside $35,000 of mandatory student fees to re-imburse students for their campaign against Prop 54. What's at issue here is not whether students are free to speak their minds on any topic at any time. The issue is whether or not other students should be forced to pay for the state and local political activities and campaigns of student government officials.
I've never been a fan of union political activity when membership in a union is mandatory or virtually so. If some union members want to form a political group and support certain candidates, that's their perogative. But union members who are in the union because it's necessary for their job should not be spending money to support candidates with whom or policies with which they disagree. And neither should public university students.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at February 24, 2004 08:12 AM