Citizen initiatives are a major feature of the political landscape in California, whose voter guide with its summaries from "For" and "Against" campaigns is an excellent model worth emulating. John Fund, who does some of the best work out there on subjects like elections and their associated corruption/malfeasance, turns in this report:
"Direct democracy in the 24 states that allow it often makes government function when arrogant, self-absorbed legislatures are gridlocked. Voters in several states have imposed term limits and curbed bilingual education and racial quotas, hot-button issues legislators often shrink from tackling. Liberals have used initiatives to pass minimum-wage hikes and tobacco taxes that were often blocked by legislatures where powerful lobbyists hold sway..."
Fund reports that judges are using a number of pretexts to block these initiatives, some of which are patently and transparently ridiculous. It's hardly an unexpected result of the courts' increasing drift into a role as partisan members of the political class, but it's a bad one that deserves and needs reversal. The politicians also need to be watched, of course, since they're the most obviously apt to rig the system against citizen initiatives if left unsupervised. So, too, the NGOs and activists involved need to be held to proper standards of behaviour and transparency. Fund reports on a number of problems, and suggests a few important solutions.
I'm watching a couple of initiatives in Oregon and Nebraska that will try to limit public funding for higher education, something legislatures are loathe to touch. It could be the first step in cleaning the mess up. Oregon higher ed is marinated in multiculti drivel, to the point that they tolerate a patently revolutionary organization whose emblem includes a stick of dynamite and a lit fuse (Meccha). Granted they're not as violent as Al Qaeda, yet, but they're definitely a racist cult.
Anyway, it'll be interesting to see if any of these initiatives pass. The one in Oregon might even prevent tuition raises from filling in the gap. They'll be stuck with making appeals to alumni, many of whom aren't too happy with the state of the campus. Ironically these campuses might end up with some genuine ideological diversity for once.
Alas for them, they could not block the inclusion of Initative #90, which if it passes will make Colorado the first (but almost certainly not the last) state to impose term limits on Supreme Court judges. Those left-head paleocrats might have to get real jobs ...
Let's see how many mistakes can get crammed into two comments.
1. Public universities tolerate clowns like Mecha because they are subject to the First Amendment. I can't wait to see you choke if universities start banning clubs on ideological grounds and go after Team Republicanazi first.
2. While K-12 funding is hard for legislatures to touch, college isn't. That's why fees in the University of California system are now almost ten times what they were when I started, 25 years ago. And UC isn't even the most expensive; Michigan is.
3. State universities are ramping up their alumni harvesting efforts already to fill the gap, but you might remember this when you bitch about how many new administrators have been added. While it's quite true that educational bureaucracy is just as swollen and self-aggrandizing as any other, the diversion of resources to fundraising can't be made without internal realignment.
4. Can Glen explain to me how Colorado, which has had mostly GOP governance these last years, would have filled its Supreme Court with paleocrats?
5. Retired state supreme court justices will not have any trouble finding positions in academia or in private practice, and the latter will pay much better than the bench.
It's not that they tolerate them. It's that they promote them. Meccha isn't just a tolerated club, they're part and parcel of the "Five-year Diversity Plan" that is an administrative/faculty initiative.
Oh come on. I worked for the lobbying arm of university administration in Virginia, and they can work pretty effectively to block changes to the funding. The rise in prices is driven by the huge increase in administrative costs of universities, including all these multiculti programs that they all think they need. I mean how many experts in multiculturalism and diversity does a university really need? It's almost a sector of the economy at this point.
What they'll have to do is install a little accountability, or at least that's the hope. It's beginning to work in a few universities as they establish small programs that promote stuff like Lockean values... not seen in many universities for decades. American Studies has become something more akin to anti-American Studies.
I'm not agoinst having these views represented. I'm against the fact that they're virtually the only views represented at many universities. Hence we need some sort of federalism, with some conflicting viewpoints and arguments. The archetype is the James Madison Program at Princeton.
All that said, if it were only a matter of public funding that doesn't explain why private universities are often even more ideologically biased than public universities. So I'm not convinced things are as simple as controlling the purse strings. A kind of groupthink has taken over, which would be just as bad were it controlled by the right. It runs directly counter to most expectations about the effects of "academic freedom", so something has gone awry. You don't see it because you agree with the group.
Alumni are beginning to exert more influence over universities, a natural conjunction of (a) information technology like the Internet & blogs cutting through the usual happy talk b.s. and (b) the universities' ramping up of alumni fundraising, even as (c ) their costs grow faster than the rate of inflation and leave many of those alumni in very serious debt.
Interestingly, and back on topic from Andrew's shilling for the Stalinist Left and the racists at Mecha... see the recent efforts by Dartmouth administrators to block accountability created by a direct democracy provision for the addition of candidates. The parallels are apt and it's the same kind of jerking around Fund discusses. It's just that in universities you aren't usually dealing with anything resembling free government (or often, anything that would even recognize or understand it).
Direct democracy in the 24 states that allow it often makes government function . . .
California is a functioning state? Is it in the top 50% in terms of functioning?
Florida has an interesting initiative on the table this election. It proposes to raise the vote to enact an initiative to 60% of votes cast rather than a simple majority. Of course, this initiative needs only 50%+1.
Andrew:
Most of the currently serving justices - as many as six of them, I think - were appointed by Roy Romer of DNC fame.
How do I explain this? Incredibly, since the 1820s Democrats who hold executive office have been allowed to appoint judges to state and federal courts. Beginning with the first Supreme Court justice ever appointed by a Democrat, Roger "Dred Scott" Taney. Will we never learn?
#3
A ten fold increase since 1979 in a highly subsidized State ran education system is nothing compared to private college increases. Also, UCBerkley, UCIrvine, UCLA are all top tier schools that can compete with the most expensive Ivy Leagues. Shelling out that paltry 6k a year vs 45-50k is hardly something to cry over. And lets put blame where it belongs, with the California legislature that ran the states fiscal house into the ground while Gray Davis was at the helm. Taking a 24 billion dollar surplus and running up a 38 billion dollar debt isn't sound fiscal managment. All state fees were jacked up to help offset this. My state beach parking fee went from 35 bucks to 125 , as did fees for most all services.
Public Universities cater exclusivly to groups like MeCHa, its clearly so when you compare budgets for groups like MeCHa vs Conservative or GOP leaning college groups.
One thing I believe Fund misses is that these "voter initiatives" don't necessarily empower voters, as much as they empower the Courts. By taking an issue out of the arena of legislation and making it a Constitutional issue, the courts will be in charge of enforcing and interpreting the initiative.
Which leads to the second problem: many of these voter initiatives are poorly written. Look at the Florida anti-gerrymandering referendum. The referendum states that it creates a "nonpartisan commission" to create legislative districts. In fact, the referendum establishes a bipartisan commission with members appointed by the Governor and legislative leaders. If fairness and accuracy were important, we would change the wording, but citizen initiatives require the approval of the citizens, so you have to start over. Its not simply that citizen initiatives are poorly written, but unlike legislation, they are not debated and subjected to scrutiny before final language is proposed. Moreover, if the law turns out to have problems, the legislature can correct it pretty easily. Constitutional problems can take years and decades to fix.
So, I generally support tough judicial scrutiny of changes to the constitution even though I think gerrymandering is one of the most important issues that needs to be addressed.