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SOURCE: The News and Observer
03.05.07
EDITORIAL: Pack in PACS
Students from North Carolina's historically black universities who appeared at the General Assembly last Wednesday ought to get extra credit for activism and for having a keen understanding of what's really going on down Jones Street way. They know it, and they said it. And it was the truth.
The students were protesting the existence of political action committees that give campaign money to lawmakers in order to help individual campuses. Oh, the committee honchos say they're all about advancing good causes for education in general, but that's stretching it, and the people who run the committees know it. These students said, rightly, that committees formed by influential big-money boosters mean less attention is paid to the less-affluent schools in the system.
The students' cause was to pressure the University of North Carolina Board of Governors to bar members from contributing to such committees. It won't work, sad to say, because the members of that board tend to be affluent and often socially connected to the boosters who started PACs for UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State University. The NCSU PAC handed out more than $80,000 to political candidates in the last two-year election cycle. But that was downright cheap compared to the $400,000 given out by the Chapel Hill PAC.
This really is embarrassing -- supporters of public institutions that serve the state feeling like they have to cross the palms of members of another public institution, the legislature, in order the get the attention and support of lawmakers. Pay to play. No other way to put it. And are they really just about "trying to help education," as characterized by Senate President Pro Tem Marc Basnight, who has received money from at least one of the committees?
Not exactly. The UNC-Chapel Hill folks wanted, for example, freedom to set their own tuition, which would have diluted the authority of the UNC system Board of Governors. They lost that one, but got another one that was expensive for all taxpayers -- out-of-state full scholarship students were to be classified for tuition purposes as in-state students. In the long term, that will save athletics booster clubs a lot of money.
UNC system President Erskine Bowles ought to call a halt to these committees, but perhaps he feels he would lose the battle. That's a shame. In the meantime, the losers are the other member schools of the UNC system that can't afford to ante up to get in the game with legislators. That's a shame, too -- in many ways.
