Taxes v. Student Politics

Even in the anger that followed Kent and Cambodia, most college students felt that political activity was a better way to try to end the war than violence. Hundreds joined ambitious projects to campaign for peace candidates in this fall's elections. They are getting little help from "the system"--especially the Internal Revenue Service.

The IRS has taken a dim view of certain on-campus political activities. At issue are plans that call for 1) coordinating student campaigners through campus centers (like those sponsored by the Princeton-based Movement for a New Congress), and 2) granting pre-election recesses to allow students and faculty to work in campaigns. After consulting the IRS, the American Council on Education has issued cautious guidelines. Colleges that lend a substantial portion of their facilities to groups backing specific candidates or legislation may compromise their legal status as educational institutions and forfeit their exemption from local property taxes and federal taxes on endowment income. This would also cancel their contributors' right to deduct gifts from their tax returns. Also in danger of losing their educational status: colleges that shorten rather than rearrange their schedules thereby, in effect, allowing students and faculty to campaign on school time.

At first glance, campus Republican and Democratic clubs would seem to have endangered their hosts for decades. Not so--as long as they make sure that their campus offices do not become headquarters for local campaign workers.

Colleges have coped with the problem in different ways. At Columbia, the local branch of the Movement for a New Congress was forced off campus, at M.I.T. the group left of its own volition, and at Princeton the M.N.C. national headquarters still occupies campus offices. At the Plattsburgh campus of the State University of New York, S.U.N.Y. trustees canceled a planned recess; similar plans are being reconsidered at Columbia and Rutgers. The faculties of Harvard and Williams also voted down student requests for time off. Said Harvard: "If the university accommodates its work or reshapes its goals to political purposes, however worthy, its functions will be jeopardized, its quality eroded, its existence ultimately brought into question."

More sanguine about their futures, M.I.T., Vassar, Cornell, Princeton and the City University of New York will recess for one or two weeks before the election and reduce other vacations accordingly. At New York's Hofstra University, the problem is academic: 71% of Hofstra's students voted not to close.

Tax-hungry cities are getting into the act. In Waltham, Mass., home of Brandeis University, the local board of assessors threatened the school with a $10,000 tax bill for the building used by a nationwide campus-fever monitoring project: the student-run strike information center. As a result, the center has left the Brandeis campus. Boston has asked colleges owning property in the city to report on whether political-action groups are using their facilities. The threat has no effect on far-left campus groups like the S.D.S., which do not engage in conventional politics but spend their energies attacking the system.

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