THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 22, 1995 TAG: 9508220312
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
Religious publications can now get funding at the University of Virginia, where the Board of Visitors on Monday also moved toward making student activity fees optional.
The decision to lift the funding ban was made to comply with a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
Many public colleges that have a similar funding exclusion for religious organizations and mandatory fees have been watching how Virginia deals with the legal challenge.
``A lot of schools are looking to the University of Virginia to see how this plays out,'' U.Va. Rector Hovey Dabney said.
The U.Va. Board of Visitors followed the advice of the state attorney general's office and cast aside two other options - doing away with the student activity fund or allowing funding for all three excluded groups, religious, political and social.
``The board put itself on the line for students,'' said student council president Carlos Brown, who argued before the board that 60 percent of a college student's education occurs outside the classroom. ``Doing away with the fees would have been traumatic and disastrous.''
To defend against future lawsuits, the board asked the administration to come up with a long-term policy for funding student groups with activity fees and develop a plan that would allow students to withhold at least a portion of their activity fee.
``What's at stake in all this is requiring people to support forms of speech in which they fundamentally disagree,'' U.Va. attorney Earl Dudley said.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that the university acted unconstitutionally when it refused to give students $5,000 in 1991 to publish Wide Awake, an evangelical Christian student magazine. by CNB