UW fee handouts again stir conflict
Catholic group vows to sue
By MEGAN TWOHEY
mtwohey@journalsentinel.com
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=419906
Posted: April 30, 2006
Ten years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was taken to court by several of its law students who challenged a requirement that all students pay a fee to fund student organizations on campus.
The university said the goal of the student fee program was to expose students to a variety of opinions and activities. The law students argued that it violated their free speech by forcing them to support groups they found offensive, such as the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Campus Center.
The case - Southworth vs. The UW System Board of Regents - was litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2000, the court ruled that UW-Madison's student fee program was constitutional, but only if the money was distributed to student organizations regardless of their viewpoints.
The decision, which affected public universities across the country, is now being tested on the campus where it began.
Chancellor John Wiley announced last month that he would deny student fee funding to the UW Roman Catholic Foundation, saying it would violate the separation of church and state if fees were used to support Lenten booklets, Bible studies and other religious activities of the non-profit organization.
The foundation, which describes itself as "unabashedly religious," is furious and vowing to sue. It insists that Wiley is discriminating against its religious viewpoint in violation of the Supreme Court ruling. It has the support of the Alliance Defense Fund, a national organization that helped launch the Southworth lawsuit a decade ago.
"You can't say you'll fund the band, the sexual expressive activities, the lesbians, then single out worship as the one thing you won't fund," said Tim Kruse, the foundation's director of development and small groups.
Faced with a potential lawsuit and the scrutiny of angry legislators, Wiley is reviewing his decision. He is expected to deliver his final verdict as early as today. The Roman Catholic Foundation, which serves thousands of Catholics on and off campus, dates back to 1907. The organization coordinates a variety of services, including Masses, religious lectures, theater productions and service projects. It funds part-time positions for nine students, a priest, three nuns and four laypeople, and owns two buildings on campus. One building includes a chapel and a room where meals are provided for the homeless.
All of this costs the foundation nearly $900,000 a year. Most of that money comes from private donations and offerings at Sunday Masses.
Funding request follows ruling
It wasn't until the 2003-'04 school year that the foundation sought financial assistance from the university.
Emboldened by the Southworth decision, it began seeking $200,000 a year in student fee funding to help cover the cost of its staff, activities and overhead expenses. After the Supreme Court ruling, the UW System eliminated a prohibition on using student fee funding for "activities which are politically partisan or religious in nature." The foundation wanted a piece of the pie.
It received $44,000 the first year and $88,000 the second. But not without a fight.
"It was a tough battle," Kruse said. "When our students got up to ask for funding, they were treated like drug dealers. The committee would always grill them with question like 'What are you going to use this funding for? Do you worship while you work? Are you going to use the money for worship materials?' Which was ridiculous because worship is free speech."
Kruse continued: "But we didn't even fight them on that. We said we'll just use the money for retreats and education."
The committee of students that distributes student fee funding had reason to ask questions.
In October 2004, Luoluo Hong, then UW-Madison's dean of students, issued a memo saying that university funds could not be used to directly support the operating costs of a church or a strictly church-related activity if the money could be seen as a donation to the church or as being in lieu of other contributions to the church normally used to cover similar costs.
A memo issued the same month by the general counsel of the UW System echoed that restriction. It said segregated fees could not be used to provide gifts, donations or contributions to political or religious organizations, campaigns or candidates.
In the same memo, however, Hong said that student fees could be used to support educational and expressive activities that "are religious in nature."
The result was confusion.
"It's a very, very thin line between what can be funded and what can't," said senior Rachelle Stone, chair of the Student Services Finance Committee. "It's hard to make decisions in such a gray area."
This year, the confusion and conflict escalated, with the committee denying many of the UW Roman Catholic Foundation's requests for funding only to have its decisions overturned by a student judiciary committee.
In the UW System, chancellors and the Board of Regents make the final decisions on what to fund with student fees. This year, Wiley paid close attention to the student fee budget that landed on his desk.
In November, the regents launched an audit of student fees in the system after reports that the fees had more than doubled in the last decade to as high as nearly $1,150 a year on one campus. Wiley wanted to make sure that student fees were being distributed fairly and with caution, said Casey Nagy, executive assistant to the chancellor.
"We've been receiving a lot of calls from students and regents who want us to exercise more vigilance on expenditure of student fees," Nagy said.
In an April letter to the Student Services Finance Committee and the broader student government, Wiley took issue with a number of student fee funding decisions. Most controversial, though, was his challenge of certain items in the UW Roman Catholic Foundation budget on the ground that they were too religious.
Wiley called into question Bible studies and other activities that he said appeared to be "intrinsically religious." Funding the printing of Lenten booklets and weekly bulletins, he said, cannot be approved unless the foundation can demonstrate that they are being used for non-religious reasons.
Nagy said the administration doesn't see that as discrimination against a religious viewpoint. Rather, he said, the university is prohibiting funding of only those activities that are explicitly religious in accordance with the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
As the foundation sees it, the administration's position is duplicitous. "Everything we do is explicitly religious," Kruse said. That is not justification to deny it funding.
In Wiley's threat, Kruse sees a lawsuit. So does the Alliance Defense Fund, which fights for the freedom of religious expression.
"We still think that students should not be forced by the government to fund expression that they find offensive," said David French, director of the Alliance Defense Fund's Center for Academic Freedom. "But so long as the law is that those funds must be distributed in a viewpoint neutral way, we're going to fight to have that enforced."
No public universities should fund any religions groups. Any.