Never much interested in property rights, leftists happily scoop up other people’s money through taxes to use in their projects for further increasing the power of the state. Universities are wonderful venues for that: lots of money flowing in, an environment that’s overwhelmingly receptive to their notions, and friends in high places who can be counted on to pay little attention to what they’re doing.

The UNC system is typical in that regard. Instead of just turning a blind eye to the misuse of public funds, however, the Board of Governors (BOG) has taken a close look at a number of supposedly academic centers that are really engaged entirely in political advocacy. In this Pope Center piece, Jesse Saffron writes that university-backed political advocacy may be on the way out.

Saffron focuses especially on UNC-Chapel Hill’s Center for Civil Rights. The BOG identified it as one of thirteen centers that needs more supervision, which seems to mean “You’d better scale way back on the partisanship, or else.” This center proclaims that it has “a progressive civil rights agenda” and produces lawsuits using UNC Law students as cheap labor to produce FOIA requests and discovery demands that can lead to litigation. The targets of such litigation are often local governments in North Carolina.

In one case, the Center sued the Pitt County Board of Education because the Board hadn’t done enough to satisfy the “progressive” goal of perfect racial and socio-economic diversity in each school. It’s nuisance litigation of the kind so beloved of left-wing activists. Fending off nuisance litigation, however, has its costs. The county spent more than $500,000 in legal fees to win in federal district court. Case over? No — the Center wants the Fourth Circuit to review the decision.

The left has lots of money to bring lawsuits and pursue its goal of a centrally-planned, collectivist society. State governments should neither help nor hinder any private effort at change. Stanley Fish argues, in the title of a book, that professors should “save the world on your own time.” Let’s change that to include saving the world “on your own dime.”