Accountability terrifies public higher educators

Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those with the ear of the General Assembly, want to prohibit the public from finding out what they’re teaching students at tax expense. For the fourth straight year they have persuaded legislators to advance a bill that would exempt the outlines of their courses — “syllabuses” — from disclosure under the state’s freedom-of-information law.

Thus the courses being taught — their materials, assignments, grading policies, and teaching schedules — would become state secrets.

Why? Because the higher educators are terrified of criticism — terrified that the FOI law might be “weaponized” by anti-intellectual yahoos to try to hold them to account for their work.

But of course to serve as a weapon of accountability in government is the very point of FOI law. There can be no accountability if the governed can’t examine what the government is doing.

In recent years higher education, like lower education, has been taken over by the political left and now is sometimes much engaged in propagandizing as much as teaching. Liberals and Democrats outnumber conservatives and Republicans in education jobs by dozens to one. Any institution so politically one-sided needs extra scrutiny to determine if it serves the public interest.

Indeed, the secrecy legislation sought by Connecticut’s public higher educators is proof that they can’t be trusted to serve the public interest.

The public higher educators are also again seeking legislation to prevent disclosure of records about their teaching or research on scholarly issues, again fearing that disclosure will facilitate criticism, which they deliberately misconstrue as harassment and intimidation.

Yes, some government records will always be requested by people who dislike what the government is doing or what they suspect it is doing. Some requesters of records may even be malicious. But so what?

For in a democracy people are entitled to dislike what the government is doing and even to hate it. They are simply entitled to know. The public higher educators may have forgotten it, but disliking what the government is doing was at the heart of the American Revolution.

Besides, the state Freedom of Information Commission is already empowered to dismiss requests for public records that constitute mere harassment.

The problem is that Connecticut’s public higher educators, or at least those who purport to represent them, consider simple accountability itself to be hateful. So they should switch to teaching in private colleges and universities, or in government colleges and universities in places like Russia, China, North Korea, or Iran. Their “academic freedom” might be constrained in those places, but they’d never have to answer to the public for what the government paid them to do.

Limit property
tax exemptions

New Haven is celebrating Yale University’s decision to increase its voluntary annual payment to city government by 43% over the next seven years, from $23 million now to $33.6 million in 2033. This may be generous of the university in light of the huge new punitive tax the federal government has levied on Yale’s $40-billion-plus endowment and other big university endowments.

Despite the big increase in Yale’s annual gift, the city is likely to raise its property taxes by 4%, which, like the property taxes of all Connecticut’s cities, are already far too high. Welcome as it is, the university’s higher annual voluntary payment doesn’t really address the city’s big tax problem.

That problem is that most real estate in New Haven, about 56% of it, is tax-exempt under state law, and while the university is still the city’s second-largest property taxpayer, it owns 45% of the property in the city and most of it is tax-exempt — $4.5 billion worth.

This is a gross failure of state government policy. Property tax exemptions per property owner should be sharply limited, starting with a gradual reduction of Yale’s exemption to $1 billion. Eventually that would bring tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue to New Haven city government each year, allowing a reduction in property taxes and state financial aid.

Yet state government pays little attention to the issue.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.