TIME TO PUT END TO COMPULSORY STUDENT FEES

A case that could change the way public colleges and universities operate is currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue is a question that has been kicking around American higher education for a generation or more: whether public universities and colleges can continue using money from mandatory student fees to finance controversial campus groups and speakers.

Involved here is a fundamental issue of compelling individual students to support ideas they not only don't agree with, but may even passionately oppose. Most of us would probably consider this fundamentally un-American. Any such practice is even more indefensible when it flies under the banner of that individual's government acting through its public institutions of higher education.

Yet this is precisely what public colleges and universities have been doing with compulsory student fees. Students at these public institutions have no choice in paying fees which support a variety of extracurricular activities ranging from bringing notables to campus to funding for student organizations.

Well, what about it? Should a pro-life, conservative fundamentalist Christian student, together with his or her parents, be assessed compulsory fees a slice of which fund the Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Campus Center, the International Socialist Organization or the campus abortion clinic? The consensus on most campuses today would answer yes to that question, citing the need for the "diversity." How far, then, does that commitment to diversity extend? Does it embrace, one Supreme Court justice asked Wisconsin's attorneys, the right of the KKK or the American Nazi Party to send speakers to campus, paid for by compulsory fees.

The only way out of this dead end is to pull the plug on the racket of compulsory student fees. We hope the court will decide for the traditional American understanding of an individual's right to be let alone in the pursuit of his or her education, at a public institution supported by his or her tax money, free of having to pay for views and organizations with which that student passionately disagrees.