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As a libertarian teaching at a Virginia University, can we expect further comment on the Virginia Attorney-General’s effort to remove all protection against discrimination on the basis of sexual preference or orientation at Virginia’s universities?

For those who believe in ‘markets in everything’, what consequences will these public efforts have for the markets in graduate students and faculty, for example? Given that universities already compete for good graduate students (who come from a generation that largely finds policies like the Attorney General’s atavistic at best), can we assume that the cost of recruiting all but reactionary graduate students will go up. Thus, the consequences may be modest for the business and law schools, but lead to significant changes in the cost or makeup of the graduate cohorts in Arts and Sciences?

The market for faculty is more complex: a minority of professors are highly-sought and can pick and choose their employement; they are, on the whole, less likely to consider moving to Virginia, given the cultural makeup of the professoriate. But the majority of academics are not in this luckly elite, and therefore have much less choice in considering job prospects. My first approximation is that this policy will therefore prevent UVa and W+M and the other universities in the state from recruiting top faculty (except for the minority that is socially conservative), but have only a modest effect on assistant professor hiring in any field.

Moreover, the reactionary politics of the state will lead some alumni to stop supporting the University in any way — as I chose to do years ago, already, after the Virginia General Assembly attempted to subvert the law of contract with regard to private contracts between same-sex partners. (This story is a good reminder to fly to Baltimore, not Dulles or National, and to take the other necessary steps to avoid supporting the commonwealth with my resources.) The effect of such choices may be to make the universities poorer, and more dependent on state resources (though perhaps the policy will also attract big-money donations from wealthy bigots, as well, who will have a high-profile target for their donations with more impact than the current crop of hard-right institutions).

Speaking for myself, as a liberal graduate of UVa (which now gets less than 10% of its funding from the state), I think the Board of Visitors should tell the Attorney General to shove it: the state stopped paying the piper over the last generation, but the current Attorney General seems to believe he can still call the tune.

Close your tags.

Of coure the government does not set ALL policies but for those that ARE set by the “higher” authority a lesser authority cannot override them. What I’d be interested to know if there are any other policies that are being contravened by the school in this way that are not being challenged by the current administration.

I do not agree with the discrimination policy but feel that the state government does in fact have the right to set specific policies if they so choose and to do so without being overriden by a subsidary body. If the school wanted to discriminate against females or blacks even though the state (and federal) law say they cannot the argument would be the same.

The reality is that those persons in change of hiring and making admissions decisions are fully able to practice non-discrimination regardless of any laws allowing discrimination to occur.

David J,

So is it that UVA et all are contravening the policy of the Commonwealth, or is it that they’re simply going beyond what the legislature has addressed? Of course if the legislature has said something to the effect of “we set the non-discrimination policies of public institutions in the Commonwealth, and so when a public institution adopts a non-discrimination policy that seeks to protect a group(s) we have not instructed them to, the institution is in violation.” Or perhaps they’ve said something like “sexual orientation shall not be a protected group/characteristic in the Commonwealth.”

I assume you have some knowledge that something like the above has been officially declared by the legislature, because I don’t think you would assume that the universities are contravening Commonwealth policy if all the universities are doing is writing their own policy over and above what’s been codified by the legislature.

I mean, of course, if they aren’t explicitly contravening the legislature, then Ken’s post wins the argument.

Ken,

It seems like you’ve been persuaded, like I have, by David J’s argument. But when you say that if W&M established a non-discrimination policy that what they are essentially doing is regulating their own behavior, I have to wonder if that’s all they’re doing.

I suppose I don’t know enough to say for sure, but aren’t institutions obligated to abide by their non-discrimination policies, and if they don’t, they open themselves up for lawsuits?

“MANY contracts are created by individual institutions in the normal course of doing their business, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, nor does every such contract, whether implied or explicit, require legislation to legitimize it.”

Ken, I agree 100% with this. But I still wonder if the state has an interest in cherry picking (not to keep the cherries, but to discard them) the promises that might open state institutions up to liability. So we seem to have established that it’s not that public institutions need to get approval for every contract, or that contractual obligations public institutions place on themselves need to match specific policies the state has codified, but couldn’t it still be the case that a state has legitimate authority to tell its institutions to cease certain promise-making practices?