Nation's colleges question student fees

With the issue of mandatory student fees appearing on election ballots and sparking lawsuits, students on college campuses are speaking out about the way their student governments are spending their money.

Students at the University of Michigan will be able to choose whether or not to allocate up to $5 per semester for the next three semesters to the Michigan Student Assembly on an MSA election ballot referendum next Wednesday and Thursday.

But students at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus are taking the issue even further. Five students have sued their university on the basis that mandatory student activity fees are unconstitutional because they force students to fund groups that support causes in which students may not believe.

MSA currently charges students $4.96 per semester to fund about 800 student groups, which is less than half of the nearly $12 semesterly fee Minnesota students pay to fund 36 of the university's student groups.

On Feb. 3, Jordan Lorence, legal counsel for North Star Legal Counsel in Fairfax, Va., sued Minnesota on behalf of the "conservative, right-wing" students, Lorence said, who disagree with the allocation of part of their fee to the Queer Student Cultural Center, University Young Women and La Raza Student Cultural Center, which advocate homosexuality, abortion and communism, respectively.

"What we want is that the university will not require students to fund groups against their will," Lorence said. "This is a matter of conscience for these students and the university is not respecting that."

Lorence, who represented a group of students in a similar case at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in Nov. of 1996, said he was approached last year by Minnesota student Matt Curry after he won the case in the federal district court.

"There should be an option for students not to fund certain organizations if they disagree with them," said Curry, a Minnesota senior. "Students should not have to pay for student groups with which they have ideological, religious or political differences."

Minnesota General Counsel Mark Rotenberg said the university takes the students' claims seriously but that it "has always been and will continue to be neutral in allocating funds."

"The university believes it's important to enhance the widest possible diversity of viewpoints among students on campus, and in order to promote a healthy, robust debate among students, it's important to support through a mandatory fee policy," Rotenberg said. "No one assumes all student organizations are going to be acceptable to all students. The whole point of having different student groups is so they can appeal to a wide range of students."

Lorence said that contrary to the popular belief that the lawsuit was prompted by a right-wing conspiracy, the lawsuit was filed by conservatives who feel that the student government is dominated by liberals who allocate more money to leftist student groups.

"To show how important this case is, if the political winds were to shift, and conservatives gained control of the student governments and started funding only conservative groups, the liberal students would be able to opt not to fund them," Lorence said "This is an equal-opportunity principle of constitutional law."

Curry said the case is not about taking funds away from the student groups with which he disagrees.

"We're just a couple of students that are trying to stand up for our beliefs, and that's the bottom line," Curry said. "We just want to give students the opportunity to stay true to their convictions."

At the University of Michigan, MSA's Budget Priorities Committee allocates money from student fees to student groups that have applied for funding and have met certain criteria, such as having a minimum number of group members.

While the fees have not prompted such drastic action as a lawsuit, MSA Vice President Olga Savic said the assembly has received messages from anonymous parties complaining about the fees.

"The position I take on this matter is that we fund a really diverse set of student groups, and we try to fund them on guidelines that are content neutral," Savic said. "We don't want to discriminate against any student group on the basis of the content of their viewpoint because that's unconstitutional."

Next week's MSA winter election ballot will include three proposals that will ask students to increase fees by either $4, $4.50, or $5. If passed, this fee will only be changed for the next three semesters.

The increase would be used solely to raise money to hire a law firm that would help MSA obtain the 400,000 signatures needed to put a referendum that would create a voting student regent on the statewide ballot.

Savic said the most money given to a single student group last term was $1,500. Thus, each of the University's 37,000 students pay no more than four cents to any one organization.

"If you look at the statistics, which show that at most, a student is given four cents per student group per term, the amount of paper work and bureaucracy that we would have to implement in order to allow individual students to determine which student group they personally wanted to fund would not be worth the four cents," Savic said.

"It's ridiculous to think we can do a check box and let the students choose which group they want to fund. We don't try to divvy up the money we are funding, and everybody gets an equal chance," she said.

LSA first-year student Tamar Benmoshe said she was not even aware the mandatory student fee existed.

"I think we should be able to choose. I mean, I would like to know who I was supporting," Benmoshe said. "If the fees have to be mandatory, I would want to know all the groups I was supporting. They should give us a list and inform us of what they're doing with the money and that it wasn't being wasted."

03-12-98