Lawmakers in South Carolina are heavily involved in public higher-education policy this year—just not in the ways that the colleges would like them to be.
State legislators have acknowledged pressuring the College of Charleston’s Board of Trustees to hire Lt. Gov. Glenn F. McConnell as the institution’s new president. The choice has sparked outrage because of the politicization of the process; the lieutenant governor’s well-known interest in Confederate history and memorabilia hasn’t helped.
Lawmakers have also proposed cutting about $70,000 from the budgets of the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate as punishment for recommending that incoming students read books with gay characters and themes. That proposed cut prompted charges that legislators are smothering academic freedom.
Earlier this year, legislators proposed merging the College of Charleston with the Medical University of South Carolina. Both institutions strongly opposed the bill, which was replaced with a measure to allow the college to offer more doctoral programs.
While it may seem that higher education in South Carolina is a target for legislative meddling, public colleges are just collateral damage of election-year politics, the state’s growing conservatism, and a State House that likes to flex its regulatory muscle even as it tightens the purse strings, say several political observers and elected officials.
“I think there’s a plantation culture that still exists here, a kind of boss mentality,” says Andrew C. Brack, a political columnist and a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ernest F. (Fritz) Hollings. “The legislature wants control, and it’s that control that leads to the kind of dynamics you’ve seen in recent headlines.”
Presidential Politics
What’s happening in the Palmetto State isn’t a new phenomenon. The state’s former governor, Mark Sanford, a Republican, had a prickly relationship with public colleges as he sought to reject federal stimulus money for education and later tried to ban campus construction projects to punish colleges for certain tuition increases.
While legislators resisted Governor Sanford’s efforts, they have had a hard time keeping their own hands off academe, proposing in 2011, for example, that professors teach nine credit hours per semester.
Legislative micromanaging is one thing, but this year’s conflicts between higher education and the State House touch on sensitive issues of race, history, and academic freedom.
Shortly after the College of Charleston announced that Lieutenant Governor McConnell would be its new president, the Southern Poverty Law Center circulated press notices about his activities as a Civil War re-enactor, his past ownership of a Confederate memorabilia shop, and his willingness to sell a brand of barbecue sauce produced by an avowed segregationist, Maurice Bessinger, who died in February. Mr. McConnell did not respond to requests for comment.
Faculty members and students were already upset because the lieutenant governor, an alumnus of the College of Charleston, had not been on the original list of candidates recommended by the search committee. Both the Student Government Association and the Faculty Senate have passed motions expressing no confidence in the board. Legislators, on the other hand, voted one trustee off of the board for his lack of support for the new president.
“It’s not hard to understand why the Confederate baggage is problematic,” says George W. Hopkins, a retired professor of history who teaches part time at the college and is president of the Charleston chapter of the South Carolina Progressive Network. Mr. McConnell’s affiliation with the state’s Confederate past will make it harder to recruit minority students and faculty members to the college, Mr. Hopkins says.
But much of the ire, he says, has been directed at the Board of Trustees for caving in to legislative pressure and a process that looks like stereotypical backroom politicking. “People are more upset by the procedure that selected him,” Mr. Hopkins says.
Mr. McConnell earned a reputation as a pragmatic politician during his 30 years as a state senator, and as a moderate who represents the “country-club wing of the Republican Party,” says Mr. Brack, the political columnist. “I’ve been thankful that McConnell has been there to slow down some of the craziness.”
Right Field
What Mr. Brack calls craziness, some in the legislature would call the new normal. Redistricting has ensured that the vast majority of lawmakers are safe in their seats and will run unopposed in elections this year. As in much of the country, this dynamic rewards partisanship and discourages moderate approaches and political compromise, he notes.
A group of state senators, for example, has formed the William Wallace Caucus—named for the 13th-century Scottish rebel portrayed in the 1995 movie Braveheart. In order to join the group and earn a sword-shaped lapel pin, a senator has to argue for some ultraconservative issue that is sure to be dismissed by the more moderate leadership.
That sort of attitude is what has made lawmakers willing to cut money for guided and community reading programs at the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate, says State Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter, a Democrat who opposes the budget cuts.
When asked about State Rep. Garry R. Smith, the Republican who championed those penalties in the South Carolina House of Representatives, she chuckles and says of Mr. Smith: “Yes, my colleague from Greenville, who is very clear that his way is not just the right way, but the only way.”
Representative Smith did not return calls for comment.
Several Republicans in the House opposed those cuts but feared to say anything that might encourage a primary challenge from a more conservative candidate, Ms. Cobb-Hunter said.
One member of the GOP who has openly criticized the cuts for colleges is Rep. B.R. Skelton, a professor emeritus of economics at Clemson University.
Representative Skelton says several members of the South Carolina House believe that what is taught at public colleges should be constrained by the social and moral views of their most conservative constituents, a philosophy he disagrees with. “It’s inappropriate” to make the budget cuts “just because someone doesn’t like a book,” he says.
