Academic Freedom at a Public University; J. Lott, Jr.

C onstitutional Initiative 27, which would have abolished property taxes in Mon tana, obtainedballotstatusin June 1986. Immediatelyit broughtforth horror storiesthat it wouldlead to the virtual eliminationof state and localgovernmentin Montana.The State Superin tendent of PublicSchoolssaidthat all elementary schoolsin the state wouldhave to be shut down if the initiativepassed.The typicalnumbersreleased assumedthat publicschoolswouldbear the entire burden of the revenue reduction.The Governor and otherstateofficialsmadesimilarclaims,andit lookedto me, and everyoneelse that I knew,that the initiative was dead before it even got a fair hearing. Not surprisingly,the facts were quite different from what publicofficialswere claiming.In 1984, Montanareceived19.5percentoftotalrevenuefor Professor Lott teaches in The John E. Anderson Gradu ate School of Management at UCLA. stateandlocalgovernmentsfromthe propertytax.

In Montana,total state and localgovernmentrev enue equaled29.46percent of personalincomeas comparedwitha nationalaverageof 20.5 percent. Had the property tax been eliminated in 1984, state and local governmenttreasuriesstill would have had $2 billionto spend-23.7 percentof per sonalincomein the state. Thirty-fiveother states did quite well spendingless than 23.7 percent of personal income. In fact, this 23.7 percent figure overestimated the cut because income tax rev enues would increasewhen people and corpora tionslost their propertytax deductions. The Governor'sofficereleased reams of num bers claimingsuch ridiculousthings as Montana beingthe lowestorsecondlowesttaxedstateinthe nation.Theywouldgetsuchnumbersby assuming that Montana'sfarmersand businessescould"ex port" 100 percent of their taxesto other states by raisingpricesto others,but that businessesinother statesbore the entireburdenofthe taxesthat they faced. In other words,they subtractedsuch taxes as business taxes, taxes borne by farmers, some property taxes, and other revenue sources from the total for Montana but not from the totals for other states.Needlessto say, that greatlyreduced the relativetotalfor Montana.The other bigclaim the Governor'sofficemadewas that propertytax es amounted to almost 60 percent of all govern mentrevenuein Montana.Whattheyreallymeant was "generaltax revenue,"whichdoesn'tevenin cludeall tax revenuelet alonesourceslikeincome from fees and federalgovernmenttransfers.

I could go on, but I think that this makes the general point-government officialswere being dishonest,and no one was challengingtheir nUffibers. Initially, I planned only to write an op-ed piece that appeared on July 13, 1986,in the Great Falls Tribuneand The MontanaStandard(Butte). Until then I had no contact with the four sisters who were primarily responsible for putting the ini tiative on the ballot. After Naomi Powell, one of the four, got in touch with me, I agreed to stop off in Helena and talk to Frank Adams, a former newspaperman who was writing the ballot state ment for the initiative, and then to meet with the sisters and some of their supporters in the small Montana town of Corvallis. I met them, as I recall, on July 26. I quickly be came aware why the initiative was having so many problems. The press had been relentlessly attack ing the sisters as "John Birchers" and members of secretive groups, and further accused the sisters of refusing to answer the press's questions. What was happening was that when a member of the press would contact them with questions, the sisters would reply that they would investigate and send out a press release on the subject. Needless to say, the press wanted answers on the spot.

The sisters ranged in age from late 50sto late 60s and had retired with their husbands to the Bitter root Valley. Living on fixed incomes, they had found themselves in a squeeze as the cost of living, especially their property taxes, had risen. These sisters were hardly wealthy-the furniture in Nao mi's well-kept house was quite old and worn, and their windows had cracks that were mended with tape. The sisters had spent a great deal of their life savingstrying to get the initiative on the ballot, and had gone around the state sleeping in sleeping bags while they collected the signatures for the ini tiative. The initiative, while not perfect, was pretty good and, at least to me, represented Americans seeing a problem and doing their best to solve it. However, getting the more than 50,000signatures was one thing, defending the initiative in public was another. By philosophy I am a limitedgovernment type, but I think that it was the unfairness of the cam paign that really got me to help out. The fact that Naomi had my op-ed piece taped to her refrigera tor door, and told me that she would read it every time people attacked them and things weren't go ing well, probably didn't hurt either.

Initially, I said that they could refer "number type questions" from the press to me. I quickly found that all inquiries from the press were being 113 routed in my direction, and that I had become the unofficial (and then official) spokesperson for the initiative. I viewed my primary role as just getting the correct numbers out to the press, although I did end up talking to quite a few legislators and other individuals about the benefits of lowering taxes. One week in early August, I was on the state-wide Montana Television News Network on four different evenings. OpponentsTakeAim Newspaper editorials began attacking my in volvement from the first appearance of the op-ed piece. By late August, it came to my attention that the Commissioner of Political Practices had almost filed felony charges against me because of a law forbidding state employees from engaging in political campaigns. I had no idea that such a law even existed. Fortunately, I wasn't on state salary at the time because I was planning to be on leave at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, for the coming academic year. When the commis sioner's office was informed of this fact, the pro posed charges were dropped. (Of course, no one thought of filing charges against all the other cur rently employed academics and other state em ployees working against the initiative.) During August I also began to hear of complaints from the Montana State University administration con cerning my involvement with the ballot initiative.

On several occasions I was told by the chairman of the Agricultural Economics and Economics De partment that the dean had made it clear to him that he didn't want me to speak out on its impact. Before I left for Hoover I was heavily involved in getting several prominent Montana political fig ures to endorse the initiative. Frank Adams (since the middle of August an official spokesperson for the initiative) and I had also put out quite a few press releases on its impact. Even though I left Montana in late August, I agreed to continue to speak with the press and to return to the state in September and October to participate in debates. I first returned to Montana on September 19to participate in a state-wide tele vision debate on September 22. When I returned home the Agricultural Economics and Economics Department was in a state of panic. Several mem bers of the department screamed at me that I was destroying the department because the university 114 THE FREEMAN • MARCH 1990 was going to punish them for my involvement in the initiative. I learned from the department chair man that he had been getting telephone calls from the president of the university and the dean of the School of Agriculture threatening to hurt the de partment if they did not get me to "shut up." Ap parently, they had told the chairman that the de partment had been very well treated financially in the past, and that since the department didn't seem to appreciate it, the university should look into moving some of the department's money to other departments that would appreciate it.

I ended up spending a couple of hours in the chairman's office on the 22nd listening to him de scribe the threats that my actions were posing to the department. I was told many times that while what I was saying was correct, it was best not to say anything on what was such a sensitive topic as the tax cutting initiative. While my name continued to appear in newspapers through the press releases the campaign issued, I decided very reluctantly to give in and not participate in the televised debate that night. We were able to get a local businessman to fill in for me. Incidentally, his opponent was a political science professor from the University of Montana. During the next couple of weeks, I was deeply involved in talking to the press, as the Governor's administration was really going after the initiative. The Department of Revenue Director and part of his staff were working full-time attacking it. They appeared on television and gave frequent newspa per interviews.

I returned to Montana on October 9 to partici pate in a debate in Billings with a couple of state senators. When I arrived in Bozeman the next morning, I was confronted by an almost-panicked department chairman who recounted a telephone call he had received from the dean that morning. He wanted to know if I really had said that public school teachers are "overpaid." When I told him that I had, he told me how incredibly upset the dean was and that he was not sure what the conse quences were going to be. Given the extreme pressure placed on the de partment, I had not allowed myself to schedule any additional appearances in the state despite the offers of many groups to pay my way. (I wouldn't have minded a couple of expense-paid trips home to visit my wife in Bozeman.) Constitutional Initiative 27, which would have abolished property taxes in Montana, was defeat ed on November 4, receiving 46 percent of the vote. However, Initiative 105, designed to freeze property taxes at 1986levels, passed by a comfort able margin.

Unfortunately, things didn't quiet down after the campaign ended. When the department evalu ations took place after the beginning of 1987,I was in for a few more surprises. I received the lowest ranking in the department in the category of "out reach," which deals with communicating with the general nonacademic community. I usually have very little desire to do well in such a ranking, since I am normally much more concerned about getting academic articles published. On a 0-4 scale, with 0 being the lowest, I received the only zero. Given that many people had told me that I had become the best known economist in the state, I was a little surprised. However, since I value doing research and teaching much more highly than "outreach," I normally wouldn't have cared except that the ranking obviously was made to punish me for my ballot-initiative activity.I was told that my involve ment in Constitutional Initiative 27 would not count because it was political, which was fine with me, but I still had written several other op-ed pieces that had appeared around the country, and Forbes and Regulation magazines ran articles which had mentioned my research. This low rating was made in part so as to reduce my overall evalu ation enough to keep me from getting a raise. As it turned out, this was unnecessary since no raises were given that year.

Interestingly, faculty involvement in political ac tivity is hardly uncommon on campus. In the spring of 1987, when the state legislature was de bating university funding, professors canceled their classes so that students could take a bus trip to the state capital and demonstrate for more funds. The administration "unofficially" encour aged this activity.In another instance, a member of the Physics Department, who for six years served as possibly the most freemarket member of the state legislature, had his university salary frozen during the entire period despite the fact that his state office required only 90 days work once every two years. Needless to say, how the university treated you depended on which side of the issues you were on. The final straw fell when I visited the Agricul tural Economics and Economics Department in ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT A PUBLIC UNIVERSITY 115 April 1987and was told that the method by which the entire department was being ranked relative to other departments had been changed. This ranking is important since it helps to determine how the university's money willbe divided among the departments on campus. In the past the De partment of Agricultural Economics and Eco nomics consistently had been ranked as the top department in the School of Agriculture. The dean reportedly told the chairman that they would go back to the old method if the depart ment members, especially me, behaved them selves in the future (this was repeated to both my wifeand me by the chairman). The administration was particularly concerned over reports that there was going to be a new initiative on the ballot in 1988. The chairman asked me to promise not to make any more statements to the press even if they contacted me. I informed him that I would not make such a promise, in part because if I felt someone were being dishonest I would feel duty bound to point that out, if asked.

I suppose it is not too surprising, but one thing I learned firsthand is how strongly people who re ceive their income from taxes will fight to protect that income. While administrators at Montana State University willconstantly givetheir opinions on the importance of academic freedom, they will not let something as trivial as academic freedom stand in the way of their doing what they perceive necessary to protect their jobs. This really con vinced me about the inconsistency between pub licly provided education and academic freedom. Even when people do not act as overtly as they did at Montana State University at silencing dissent, the fact that professors and administrators receive their income from taxes cannot help but color their opinions. D F.E.E 11990 Summer Seminars July 9-14 August 6-11 Join us in Irvington to explore the philosophy of freedom. Our 5-acre facilities in suburban Westchester County provide the ideal setting for intellectual pursuit. For full details and applications. write or tele phone Mrs. Dorothy Reale. Foundation for Economic Education.

(914)591-7230.