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Students taught to tax others

In a landmark case a few years ago, Wide Awake v. University of Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that if a school distributes activity fees among assorted student groups, then the fact that a student organization has a religious orientation cannot exclude the organization from funding.

A case now before the court from the University of Wisconsin is in many respects the flip-side of Wide Awake: The plaintiffs allege that mandatory student fees unconstitutionally require students to pay to support viewpoints with which they disagree.

Such fees are common on both public and private campuses, so Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin v. Southworth undoubtedly will be a closely watched case. At Wisconsin, as at many other campuses, the fees help to support a wide variety of activities, including those of groups that engage in political activities.

A group of students asserts, quite correctly, that the fee system compels them to subsidize speech with which they disagree. Therefore, they argue, their First Amendment rights are violated by the fees.

The students probably are correct. It is difficult to reach any other conclusion. The fees specifically are collected for student activities, and the span of funded student activities includes politically oriented groups. That's where the university strays into troubled constitutional waters. While the chess club or intramural hockey may interest few students, such activities do not constitute speech and there is no First Amendment issue. But the student chapters of the Sierra Club or Young Republicans clearly do raise First Amendment issues if they are supported by involuntary fees.

Universities could spare themselves legal trouble and teach some important lessons in the process if they simply told students they must figure out how to fund their own activities. As typical fee policies now stand, students are taught to tax other students to pay for things they would never pay for on their own. Better to teach them the real-world market lesson of creating groups that engage in activities sufficiently attractive to make other students want to pay to support them.

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