Editorial: Require more transparency, less politics
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Football practice will begin next week at Pennsylvania’s big state-related universities, but the Legislature’s game of political football with the institutions’ funding is a year-round, far-less-entertaining spectacle.
Teams from Penn State and Temple universities and the University of Pittsburgh all will have played at least three games by the time the lawmakers shuffle back to the Capitol after unduly long summer recesses. The Senate is due back Sept. 18; the House, Sept. 26.
They fled town in early July after failing to complete work on the new state budget. That means, in part, that Penn State, Temple, Pitt and Lincoln universities will not receive $642 million from the state government that they use to reduce in-state tuition. That, on average, is worth more than $10,000 per student.
Even with the state money, the four universities charge some of the highest public university in-state tuition rates in the nation. It’s wrong to further penalize students because of incessant political paralysis in the Capitol.
The proximate cause of the holdup is a dispute between Senate Republicans and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro over his promised veto of a $100 million scholarship program for private schools, to which Senate Republicans claimed he had agreed.
But resolving that might not resolve the university funding because the most conservative members of the House and Senate have made it an element of their cultural warfare. In recent years, they have tried to withhold funding due to fetal tissue research at Pitt. This year, they threatened Penn State’s funding on the grounds that Penn State Health supposedly had prescribed puberty blockers as part of transgender health care. PSU physicians said the treatment was to prevent premature puberty rather than to treat gender dysphoria. But, hey, legislators aren’t doctors; how were they to know?
But lawmakers of all stripes should agree on one perennial issue involving the state-related universities — greater transparency.
The schools should be subject to the Right-to-Know Law, as are most similar institutions in other states, with exemptions for proprietary research and similar matters. But broadly, in terms of how the institutions spend their public money, transparency should be a unifying rather than polarizing issue.