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The greatest public asset in the State of Montana is at risk

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The greatest public asset in the State of Montana is at risk

Mar 30, 2023 | 2:01 pm ET
By Mary Moe
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The greatest public asset in the State of Montana is at risk
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The University of Montana in Missoula (Photo by Darrell Ehrlick of the Daily Montanan).

No community settings in Montana more scrupulously attend to civil liberties than Montana University System campuses. So I was disturbed by comments last week supporting House Bill 517, proposing a constitutional referendum to let the legislature, not the regents, set the parameters for campus policies affecting constitutional freedoms. 

Students told tales of woe ranging from getting poor grades or being ostracized for their views, to having to listen to faculty’s political rants and not being able to find faculty willing to advise their political club. More chillingly, one student claimed his life had been threatened when he was “tabling” for a conservative cause on campus.  (A shouting match ensued. Police responded, characterized the incident as disorderly conduct on the part of two students, and issued a warning to both.)

Listening, I was puzzled.

Every Montana campus has well-vetted processes for lodging complaints. When the issue is criminal, police take over. When the complaint involves civil liberties or even just dissatisfaction with a grade, every campus has a venue for hearing the complaint, gathering the facts, applying the appropriate policy and rendering an impartial decision. That decision can be appealed and re-appealed, often all the way to the Board of Regents.  

None of the students complaining at the hearing had availed themselves of these processes. Some didn’t even know about them. They blamed the university system for that as well.

But these were young people, new to the exercise of their civil liberties. The same cannot be said of the bill’s sponsor.

Like the students, without ever bringing his concerns to the government entity responsible for responding to them – the Board of Regents – he bashed the board for operating as “an island of its own constitutional authority.” 

“They’re doing a great job,” he conceded, “but they’re in no way, shape, or form equipped to be constitutional arbiters” of civil rights on our campuses.

Hmmm … and the legislature is?

A constantly changing group of 150 people, few of whom have backgrounds in the law or academia, meeting for 90 days every other year? With what knowledge base? With what timeliness? With what time?

What’s really going on with HB 517 is a tale as old as time: A kid doesn’t like the answer he got from Mom so he goes to Dad. Last year Republican legislators got an answer they didn’t like from Montana’s Supreme Court when the regents challenged House Bill 102, a 2021 bill requiring campuses to allow firearms on campus. 

College campuses are among the settings the United States Supreme Court recognized as “sensitive” enough to warrant limiting Second Amendment freedoms. After hearing from thousands of Montanans, the regents made that call.  Montana’s Supreme Court unanimously held that our constitution leaves no doubt it was the regents’ call to make.

So the bill sponsor wants you to overrule the supreme courts of this state and nation, as well as a nonpartisan Board of Regents, and leave all decisions about civil liberties on campus to – surprise! — legislators. Good ol’ l’etat c’est moi … again.

If HB 517 dealt only with the Second Amendment on Montana campuses, I wouldn’t be as concerned. But HB 517 wants to make the legislature the arbiter of all civil rights on campus. The sponsor assures us the bill won’t affect academic matters, just civil liberties, but it’s simply impossible to separate those liberties, especially those enshrined in the First Amendment, from research, teaching and learning. 

On the pretext of protecting civil liberties, the legislature could prescribe which books can be assigned in classrooms and available in libraries; which instructors to criminalize for their research, materials selection, grading or advising; which students to restrict from expressing themselves, and which programs to introduce or discontinue.

You’ve been following this legislature. Can you doubt that they will?

I’ve been a campus CEO. I’ve had to go to the legislature session after session asking for funding. I’ve had to learn the dance higher education administrators must do to dodge the political pressures applied by this legislator or that one without jeopardizing the interests of students and employees on my campus. 

As an example, at one point enrollments on my campus were such that we desperately needed to expand our facility. After weeks testifying before this committee and that one, I got my most important feedback in the women’s restroom. A lobbyist told me that an influential legislator felt our building project should come at a price — the environmental studies program at the University of Montana. Not on my watch, I told her.

The balance of power between regents and legislators isn’t perfect now. But at least if you don’t go along to get along, all you lose is funding or a facility. If, after a campaign of half-truths heavily funded by the same national groups funding proponents of HB 517, voters approve this amendment to our constitution, we will lose the very core of higher education – freedom of inquiry, reflection, debate and expression.

We’ve been down this road before. Before the 1972 constitution insulated the university system from legislative shenanigans, higher education in Montana was nationally blacklisted – repeatedly – for its abuses of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. Today, thanks in large part to the hard work of an unpaid board of public servants, it’s arguably Montana’s greatest government-created asset.

If we can keep it.