People who usually yawn with indifference when the subject of the intent of the US Constitution is involved (say, the matter of universities using racial preferences in admittance and hiring) sometimes get hot and bothered when some constitutional provision is not interpreted exactly to their liking. That is evidently the case regarding the North Carolina Constitution’s exhortation that UNC tuition should be kept “as low as practicable.” John Hood writes about this kerfuffle here. See the links, particularly to the piece by Chris Fitzsimon, which claims to find an inconsistency between the advocacy by the Locke Foundation and the Pope Center for higher tuition for students in the UNC system and the language of the constitution.
I think Fitzsimon’s smirky contention holds as much water as a fishnet.
The “as free of expense . . . as is practicable” language is just about a vague as constitutional language ever gets, providing no standard whatsover for judging how the legislature or the courts are to decide at what point tuition would not be “as free of expense as is practicable.” The Supreme Court of North Carolina has never adjudicated a case involving this language, so it’s stretching things more than a bit for low tuition advocates to say that the recent increases and a fortiori any further increases are unconstitutional. They don’t know that.
What is a sensible reading of the language here? I submit that the most sensible interpretation would go like this: Given the totality of the state’s budgetary situation, the General Assembly may not raise tuition for students at UNC institutions higher than it deems necessary. It is within the discretion of the General Assembly, in other words, to decide how much of the cost of their education UNC students should pay, and it gets to decide that the same way it decides other budgetary questions.
If the writers of the Constitution had meant to do otherwise, they could easily have chosen language that would have unequivocally set a ceiling on tuition. They didn’t.
