Will Illinois , the land of Abraham Lincoln, return to the heinous practice of putting a price on race? That’s what a bill on how to fund public universities seeks to do. Whether it passes muster with the courts will be another matter.
According to a complex funding formula to be laid out in the bill, colleges and universities in the Prairie State would receive $6,000 for every black or American Indian student enrolled. Hispanics don’t fetch that much — only $4,000 per student. White and Asian students don’t get any money at all.
The bill, S.B. 3965 , was introduced on July 30 by state Senate Majority Leader Kimberly A. Lightford, a Democrat from Maywood, a town in the Chicago metropolitan area. The House version is being written by state Rep. Carol Ammons, also a Democrat from the Champaign-Urbana area. S.B. 3965 appears nowhere online because it hasn’t had its first reading. But Ammons’s chief of staff told me that both the state Senate and state House bills will include the recommendations of a report that the Commission on Equitable Public University Funding published in March.