Student Counsel

A fascinating trend on U.S. campuses this year is the emergence of hired professionals to defend students' interests. At six of the University of California's nine campuses, for instance, student governments are spending $ 12,000 for a lobbyist to represent them for six months at the state capital in Sacramento. Boston University students have retained a local attorney; federal poverty lawyers help University of Michigan students. But what if the lawyers clash with the administrators?

That question is being tested at the University of Texas, where the student association last summer hired the nation's first full-time lawyer for students. During his first six months, Jim Boyle, 26, a Texas law-school graduate, earned his modest pay ($12,500 a year) by helping more than 300 students who complained of gouging by off-campus merchants and landlords. Then two months ago, Boyle went to bat for the Gay Liberation Front, which had been denied recognition as a campus club.

Stopped Check. Boyle did not personally favor the group's aims or its demand for campus meeting rooms. But he was convinced that the university had barred the club arbitrarily, denying the homosexuals' due-process right to be heard. He won them an open hearing before a student-faculty review committee. An assistant dean testified that he had rejected the club because of objections by campus doctors. Boyle's cross-examination showed that the dean had not sought medical opinion until five months after his decision. Result: the committee voted 7-2 to overturn his ruling.

Next day, the administration overruled the committee. The Texas regents tried to bar Boyle from representing groups against the university. In turn, the lawyer argued that the regents had violated state laws by adopting a new rule without adequate notice. If the regents sustain the ban at their meeting this week, Boyle's supporters threaten to sue them in federal court for violating the students' right to counsel.

The regents' strong-willed chairman, Frank Erwin (TIME, Aug. 10), has already struck back. Two weeks ago, he decided that Boyle is a state employee because the university collects the student funds that pay him. Erwin stopped the lawyer's paycheck. As Erwin sees it, "We can't have state money used to implement university policy and other state money used to fight it."

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