Justices to Rule on Student Fees Use

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether students at state universities can be forced to pay fees used to fund campus groups with a political agenda, ranging from environmentalists to gay-rights advocates and socialists.

Though the amounts of money at stake are small, the issue of who receives mandatory student fees has become an ideological battleground on many campuses.

Young conservatives have attacked the fees as a violation of their 1st Amendment rights. They maintain that they should not be forced to subsidize groups whose messages they oppose.

University Leaders Support Use of Fees

Supporting the mandatory fees, university officials and liberal advocates say that the 1st Amendment is strengthened, not violated, when a broad array of groups can publish magazines and bring speakers to campus.

The conservatives won an important victory in October when the U.S. court of appeals in Chicago struck down the mandatory fees at the University of Wisconsin.

Students there are required to pay a fee of $166 per semester. While most of the money funds such services as the university health center and shuttle buses, a portion is distributed by the student government to private groups. They include the UW Greens, an environmental lobby; the International Socialist Organization and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Campus Center. In all, conservative law students disputed the funding of 18 organizations.

Certainly these groups have a free-speech right to espouse their views on campus, the appeals court said, but forcing all students to subsidize their message is another matter.

“The Regents [of the university] cannot use objecting students’ mandatory activity fees to fund organizations which engaged in political or ideological activities, advocacy or speech,” wrote Judge Daniel A. Manion.

Manion’s opinion for the three-judge panel relied on earlier Supreme Court rulings that said schoolteachers and members of the state bar could not be forced to pay fees that in turn pay for political contributions or lobbying. The appeals court did not decide finally, however, whether the University of Wisconsin must stop funding these campus groups entirely, or whether it must merely give dissenters a right to a refund.

In the meantime, the university appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case (Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin vs. Southworth, 98-1189) during the fall.

The Lambda Legal Defense Fund, the New York-based gay-rights group, had urged the court to hear the Wisconsin case. “Just like we all must pay for a public park, no matter who sets up a soap box there, students can be required to contribute to a university fee system for all student groups, regardless of the recipients,” said Kevin M. Cathcart, the group’s executive director.

But a lawyer who aided the conservative students said that gay activists on campus have not been willing to tolerate the use of student fees to support Christian groups that oppose homosexuality.

“When a campus Christian group applied for a few hundred dollars, the gay groups opposed it. Ironically, they said they should not be compelled to fund a group that says homosexuality is sinful,” said Jordan W. Lorence of the Northstar Legal Center in Fairfax, Va.

University officials said Monday that they have a policy against funding student groups with a partisan or religious viewpoint. In 1995, the Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a University of Virginia policy that allowed subsidies for all student publications, except those with a religious viewpoint.

The dispute over the use of student fees is not a new one for Californians. The state Supreme Court, agreeing with conservative students in 1992, said that dissenters must be given a right to a refund for that part of mandatory fees used for ideologically oriented groups.

Justices Fail to Revive Dallas Preference Plan

Meanwhile, the justices refused to revive an affirmative action program for Dallas firefighters, signaling again the court’s opposition to preferences based on race or gender.

In 1976, under pressure from federal officials, Dallas had agreed to the plan that gave blacks, Latinos and women an edge in hiring and promotions. It was intended to remedy the virtual exclusion of minorities in the ranks of city firefighters.

But in 1995, white firefighters challenged the plan as no longer needed or justified, and the U.S. appeals court in Texas struck it down last year.

Only Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted to hear the city’s appeal in the case (Dallas vs. Dallas Firefighters Assn., 98-966).