At the risk of making the VC read like The Corner, I just wanted to note that I agree with Sasha that government ownership and control of universities inherently raises troubling issues of freedom of expression. Indeed, in You Can’t Say That, I wrote, “The inevitability of content-based regulation of academic expression on public university campuses suggests a strong civil libertarian case that government should not be in the business of running universities at all.” But this doesn’t change my view that once the government is allowed to run a university, it should be allowed to run it in a way that pursues reasonable educational goals, even if doing so conflicts with the values of certain students. To take an extreme example, the creationist shouldn’t get equal time with the evolutinist in the biology department. But better, certainly, (from a civil liberties perspective at least) that there should be no state-run universities.
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