Leftist zealots often pretend that there is no such thing as scarcity, but when it comes to their own money, they’re as stingy as anyone else. They’d much rather use money taken from taxpayers to advance their causes, train their people, and so on, than to spend their own money. Universities give them many such opportunities and in Monday’s Pope Center article, University of North Carolina senior Alex Contarino writes about the Center for Civil Rights at his university.

In a review by the UNC Board of Governors in 2015, each of the numerous centers and institutes throughout the university system was scrutinized to see if they were doing appropriately educational things and some were found to be overly politicized and ordered closed. The Center for Civil Rights survived, but Contarino provides plenty of evidence that it shouldn’t have. He writes that the Center’s litigation “clearly pushes a partisan agenda, while exploiting the resources and prestige of UNC-Chapel Hill and causing North Carolina taxpayers to incur significant legal fees.”

For example, the Center brought suit against Pitt County, arguing that a new student-assignment plan must be stopped because it would increase racial segregation. Of course, North Carolina dropped school segregation many decades ago; what leftist groups now mean by “segregation” is that each school doesn’t have a perfect racial balance. Anyway, the court eventually ruled that the county had not violated the law — but not until the litigation had caused the taxpayers more than $500,000 in legal expenses.

One of the justifications given for the Center is that it gives UNC law students an advantage in getting experience in the social-justice field. Sure, but much of the cost of that experience is borne by taxpayers who’d rather that their money was devoted to other uses.

While some of the funding for the Center comes from deep-pocketed leftist “philanthropies” like the Ford Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, and others, the staff members are paid employees of UNC. In getting state taxpayers to cover much of the cost of legal activism and preparing future cadres of social-justice lawyers, the “progressive” dollars can be saved for other ideological purposes.

Contarino nails the truth in writing that the Center for Civil Rights is “a state-affiliated entity that essentially ‘earns its keep’ by suing other state-affiliated entities.” It is clearly a partisan organization operating in violation of UNC system rules and ought to be closed.