By Sara Russo

The University of Oregon's Programs Finance Committee (PFC) has come under scrutiny after allegations that the group abused its power and unfairly compelled a conservative student newspaper to change its mission statement to eliminate any reference to its political viewpoint before allowing the publication to receive student funds.

At a January meeting, the PFC voted unanimously to remove the terms "left wing," "political," and "conservative" from the mission statement of the Oregon Commentator, a non-partisan, conservative newspaper. Refusal on the part of the publication would have prevented the paper's budget from being approved by the PFC, which distributes the $4.3 million collected as an "incidental fee" from students.

The Commentator's mission statement reads in part, "Founded by a group of concerned student journalists on September 27 1983, the Commentator has had a major impact in the 'war of ideas' on campus, providing students with an alternative to the left-wing orthodoxy promoted by other student publications, professors and student groups…our main purpose is to show students that a political philosophy of conservatism, free thought and individual liberty is an intelligent way of looking at the world-contrary to what they might hear in classrooms and on campus."

Apparently misreading the recent Supreme Court decision, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, which allowed a public university to collect student activity fees only when the program or body which disburses such fees does not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, the PFC interpreted Southworth to mean that all student groups must themselves be viewpoint neutral. On this basis, they demanded that the Commentator, a self-proclaimed conservative paper, change its mission statement to obscure or eliminate the paper's obviously conservative perspective.

"They were totally misinterpreting [Southworth]," Pete Hunt, editor-in-chief of the Commentator told Campus Report. "Basically the Southworth decision stated that the body which allocates student funding must be value neutral, not that the groups themselves must be viewpoint neutral. That's how you come up with the notion of diversity, having diverse groups with dissenting opinions. If everyone was falling in line with the same philosophy, I don't think you'd have that."

"The allocating body must view the request for funding in a viewpoint neutral fashion," confirmed Gregg Lobisser, director of student activities at Oregon. "It does not mean that the organizations requesting funds have to be apolitical or not have philosophies that may be liberal or conservative."

Ironically, by requiring the Commentator to alter its mission statement yet leaving politically charged mission statements by left-leaning groups intact, the PFC may in fact have been violating the Southworth decision they claimed to be upholding.

"There's another paper, the Student Insurgent, which is obviously quasi-Marxist," Hunt said. "I don't think they had any trouble with their mission statement."

The Insurgent's mission statement reads, "We are unaffiliated with any partisan organization. We seek to provide a forum for those working towards a society free from oppression based on class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, species, and free from the threat of ecological collapse."

"There are definitely, at least in our opinion, a lot of political groups on campus, who just don't publicize themselves as such," Hunt added. "There's the OSPIRG, which is the Oregon Students Public Interest Research Group, which is a PIRG set up by [Ralph] Nader, I think, back in the early eighties. And they're very clearly pro-environment. I guess you could go as far as calling them leftist….We don't publicize ourselves as being Republicans. We would say conservatives. But basically we're just anti-PC."

"If you're were they [the committee] biased, yeah, I'm sure they were, against us, because we're a conservative publication," Hunt told Campus Report.

"I'm sure there were other discussions about goals statements," Lobisser told Campus Report. "The process requires that the goal statement be passed by the body before they can review the budget. As for those 100 budgets that came before them, every one of them required a vote of the fee committee, and I'm sure there was dialogue about some of them."

"None of those dialogues were elevated to the submission of a grievance," he added.

In an effort to preserve the paper's mission statement, the Commentator's publisher. Bret Jacobson, filed a grievance complaint against the Programs Finance Committee, which had tabled the motion to approve the Commentator's budget, after the controversy erupted at the initial meeting. But the Associated Students of the University of Oregon Constitution Court, the body that reviews such grievances, dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the PFC had not yet ruled on the Commentator's budget or mission statement, since the budget remained tabled. Finally, more than two weeks after the budget was stalled, the PFC unanimously approved the mission statement and budget in what the Daily Emerald editorial board labeled, "one of the quickest, most anti-climactic and confusing moments student government has seen this year."

"I think the initial hearing through the time when their goal statement was passed did take several weeks," Lobisser stated, in response to questions about why the statement took so long to be approved, "but this is a body, a student body that conducts more than 100 hearings."

Other startling facts about the PFC's mismanagement of their $4.3 million budget have since emerged, including the body's failure to keep accurate records of their meetings, as is required by the Oregon Public Meetings Law for governing bodies. The Oregon Daily Emerald attempted to view minutes from the meetings at which the Commentator's mission statement was debated, but found both written transcripts and audio recordings to be incomplete. Furthermore, two seats on the seven member PFC panel have remained vacant for the past year, leading some to claim that the PFC, which currently consists of only five individuals, does not adequately represent the student body.

Mary Madden, chairwoman of the PFC, did not respond to a request for an interview.

Hunt also noted that the PFC allocated money to the Muslim Student Association and to the campus MEChA group to fund religious parties, including for MEChA's celebration of Dia De Los Muertos, an action which he says is not permitted. "You're not supposed to give money for religious events, and they clearly did in these two cases, and that was kind of an issue. And other student groups had issues with the way the PFC has handled themselves," he said.

"They decided that these holidays were more cultural than religious, but that's clearly not the case," Hunt told Campus Report. "Christmas is cultural, but they're not going to give anybody money to have a Christmas Party."