PACs Want ‘Flexibility’

People call me cynical sometimes. Let me introduce you to the Citizens for Higher Education and the Economic Development Coalition 2000.

The first red flag? The names. Like Citizens for a Sound Economy and the New American Optimists, these groups are thoroughly ambiguous, apple-pie pablum.

Let me translate: Citizens for a Sound Economy is anti-tax, top to bottom. The New American Optimists is a group optimistic that Johnny Edwards will be the next president. And both the Citizens for Higher Education and its forebear, the Economic Development Coalition 2000, are all about stuffing politicians’ pockets when they do right by the state’s two largest public universities.

Oh, it’s all legal.

Some of the universities’ big-money backers got the bright idea that as long as they’re being hit up for campaign contributions individually, why not join together in a political action committee and get some bang for their bucks?

In its first week, the Citizens for Higher Education has collected $ 25,000. The group’s plan is to simply reward the “friends” of UNC-Chapel Hill, the way the Economic Development Coalition has been rewarding the “friends” of N.C. State for the past year.

Not the friends of the students, mind you.

I assure you, these are not groups whose existence is aimed at keeping tuition low for the children of working-poor North Carolinians.

These wealthy alums simply want more “flexibility” for their alma maters.

You remember flexibility, don’t you? The state’s two largest universities wanted the power … er, flexibility … to set salaries and raise tuition without answering to that pesky Board of Governors or that ol’ Broad, Molly.

The “flexibility” scheme was touted by UNC-CH’s special friend, Sen. Tony Rand, who also wanted to exempt the university from Chapel Hill’s zoning rules. The flexibility plan, like the zoning exemption, was ultimately quashed. But guess who has been named co-chairman of a legislative study commission on the university system’s governance?

You got it. Tony Rand.

What’s troubling about this power grab, or pseudo- secession, is that it comes at a time when the state’s largest universities should be thanking their lucky stars they are a part of the larger system they resist. It was because of the UNC-community college bond referendum, for instance, that UNC-CH has $ 500 million to spend on construction in mighty lean times. Do UNC-CH administrators really believe they would have gotten that money without the rest of the system’s help?

No matter. The ambiguously named PACs, while officially denying a “flexibility” agenda, are making system president Broad and others who truly love the entire system quake under their mortar boards.

That’s because the PACs plan to speak to our anti-intellectual legislature in terms even lawmakers without a college education can understand: dollars and cents.

Talk about cynical. And they say the students today are self-interested.