By now you’ve heard the news: Last week, Chancellor Biddy Martin refused to overrule the Student Service Finance Committee’s (SSFC’s) decision not to fund Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (C-FACT) with student segregated fees. Since C-FACT had been denied seg. fees for procedural reasons — their leadership was delinquent on the delivery of crucial funding paperwork — Biddy saw no viewpoint-neutrality dilemma in denying funding.

If C-FACT can magically prove that SSFC sabotaged their funding process, I’ll eat my words. But they can’t, so I won’t have to. Our chancellor is a liberal — but not an ideologue and certainly not a moron. Biddy knows the UW needs another seg. fees lawsuit like Mel Gibson needs another drink. Had she the faintest doubt about SSFC’s intentions, C-FACT would be cashing their $130,000+ check right now. As it stands, we will likely endure another dramatic District Court lawsuit, complete with banal platitudes from both sides.

Already I’ve received a rather terse press release from Sen. Glenn Grothman (R-West Bend). Money quotes:

“After seven years of providing funding to CFACT, it is another slap in the face to intellectual diversity on campus to leave only WISPIRG being funded,” said Grothman. “On other campuses, such as the University of Minnesota, it would be the norm to fund both organizations or whereas the University of Michigan neither organization is funded.”

“With the overwhelming leftward tilt of the university faculty, one would think Chancellor Martin would be especially sensitive to allowing student fees to fund disproportionate left-wing organizations as well. Apparently intellectual diversity must be stamped out whenever it rears its head,” said Grothman.

Yes. And apparently Glenn Grothman believes that ‘intellectual diversity’ is so important that seg. fees should be extended even to conservative organizations who fail to cooperate with basic procedural norms necessary for a coherent funding process. C-FACT’s lack of funds is their own damn fault, period.

And let me extend a final message — a history lesson, really — to those at C-FACT who are righteous with indignation right now: Before they start accusing the seg. fee system of inherent bias, and our UW administrators of culpability in viewpoint-neutrality violations, C-FACT should review some basic facts about seg. fees at UW-Madison:

It is, in the first place, vital for C-FACT to recognize a magnanimous irony — that the UW System Board of Regents 1) does not like them at all, and 2) intentionally maintains a system of student-organization funding which assures them viewpoint-neutral treatment. The Rosenberger v. University of Virginia (1995) U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that universities must maintain viewpoint-neutrality within their own student segregated-fee systems, since seg. fee systems are “limited public forums.” Said the Court: “it does not follow… that viewpoint-based restrictions are proper when the University does not itself speak or subsidize transmittal of a message it favors but instead expends funds to encourage a diversity of viewpoints from private speakers.”

So after Rosenberger, the UW could have said to hell with seg. fees and freed themselves from constitutional imperatives of their own creation. They didn’t — probably because most university administrators, as liberal as they are, recognize the need for self-constraining checks on these personal biases.

Do you follow me? If the University really had it out for C-FACT, it could simply scrap the segregated-fees system altogether and instead fund student organizations through its own monies. If administrators consider C-FACT conservative kooks who don’t deserve a public forum — if they (quite reasonably) question whether students’ C-FACT internships will mean anything when Category 5 hurricanes are a weekly occurrence in the United States and New York is underwater — it would be quick procedural work to guarantee they never receive another cent. Instead, UW has taken the opposite approach; they have preserved — quite deliberately — a system which guarantees that their anti-C-FACT bias never rules the day. And what has C-FACT done to repay this magnanimous gesture?

Well, they turned in their fucking paperwork late. And now they’re getting exactly what they deserve. Better luck next cycle.