Sanford losing battle on colleges

COLUMBIA - When Mark Sanford ran for governor, he vowed to bring some order to South Carolina's haphazard system of 13 independent four-year public colleges and universities, each going in its own direction.

But after 14 months in office, he is losing the battle. In fact, the system is getting bigger. Lawmakers last week overrode a Sanford veto of a bill that allows the University of South Carolina's two-year branch campus in Sumter to grant four-year degrees.

The bill also:

• Authorizes the creation of a four-year culinary arts program at Trident Technical College near Charleston -- the first four-year program in the state's technical education system.

• Calls for a study of a new law school at S.C. State University in Orangeburg.

• Grants the legislature the sole authority to close existing campuses. That was a direct slap at Sanford, who had suggested that the two-year USC branches at Union and Salkehatchie were unnecessary and should be shut down.

The measures were tacked on as amendments to a jobs creation bill that provides financial inducements for drug companies to relocate to South Carolina and creates a $50 million venture capital fund for startup companies.

Rather than swallow the amendments, Sanford vetoed the bill. The next day, and with little debate, lawmakers voted to override.

Sanford said loading down the bill with unrelated amendments "trampled over the interest of taxpayers."

He threatened to take the legislature to court in a constitutional challenge.

"If you cobble all these things together, you cover the whole state and have something for everybody, and you can come up with the requisite number of votes," he said.

Some lawmakers were also critical of the practice.

"It concerns me that we have a system where we have to take a lot of bad things to get some good things," said Sen. Bob Waldrep, R-Anderson.

Fred Sheheen, the former director of the S.C. Commission on Higher Education, which attempts to coordinate academic programs at public colleges, said, "They've moved us backward. That's really a nonsensical situation."

Education experts have been saying for years that too many colleges are competing for a poor state's resources, and that as a result, South Carolina has no top-tier academic institution on the order of a UNC Chapel Hill.

While North Carolina has 16 four-year public colleges serving a population of 8 million, South Carolina will now have 14 four-year colleges for 4 million people.

Sanford said when he ran for governor in 2002 that one of his top priorities would be to fix the system by persuading lawmakers to create a central board of regents over the university system, as North Carolina and Georgia have.

"It will not take all the politics out, but it is proven to take some of the politics out," Sanford said at the time.

But lawmakers let the governor know soon after he was elected that they had no interest in fighting powerful alumni groups and community interests.

Last year, community groups in Sumter had asked USC president Andrew Sorensen to grant the Sumter campus four-year status to aid local economic development. Sorensen turned them down, saying that the 900-student campus wasn't strong enough academically to offer four-year degrees.

At that point, USC Sumter turned to the legislature. Sen. Phil Leventis, D-Sumter, who got the four-year degree authorization added to the jobs bill, said the notion that South Carolina has too many colleges is false.

"It's an argument that's made by people who don't understand the system and who don't understand the students," he said. "The typical student at USC Sumter is 26 years old. They don't have the latitude to go to USC Columbia or to Clemson to get their degrees that some of us were fortunate enough to do."

But Sheheen said, "We cannot have four-year senior institutions in every county in the state. No state does, and it's too costly."

When he was commissioner of higher education, he said, he produced a map that showed a 30-mile commuting radius of every public four-year college in the state.

"The only piece of territory that wasn't covered," he said, "was a spot in the middle of Lake Marion."