Editorial: Holding university funding hostage won't solve this impasse

We depend on our leaders to fix problems when they are presented.

Whether it is a state of emergency in the face of a hurricane or recognizing a new kind of fraud and declaring it a crime, the people we elect to run our government need to find ways to identify what has gone wrong and correct it.

The problem is that not every solution is a great idea.

The Wolf administration screwed up when the Department of State did not take the steps necessary to get an amendment on the primary ballot, skipping necessary advertisements that would have let the voters weigh in on expanding the time period for adult victims of child sex abuse to pursue civil justice.

The mistake was a fresh knife in an open wound for many — especially those whose victimization was uncovered by the grand jury report on sexual abuses by Catholic clergy. The process of bringing it to the ballot would have to start over — unless Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward, R-Hempfield, would allow a bill to bypass the process. She wouldn’t.

State Reps. Jim Gregory, R-Blair County, and Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, saw the problem and tried to correct it. They say they have a group of lawmakers standing with them who are prepared to play chicken, withholding funding to state-related universities unless Ward blinks first.

Their hearts are in the right place. They see an injustice and are prepared to make a grand gesture to correct it. But this is a solution like walking across a frozen pond to rescue someone who has fallen in. It is a heavy footfall that will cause cracks that produce more problems.

The state-related universities — Pitt, Penn State, Temple and Lincoln — did not wrong anyone. Slashing their funding would not help victims. It would create new ones as students and families already struggling under burdensome tuition become collateral damage. It could impact employment in some of the state’s largest economic engines at a time when more unemployment is the last thing the state needs.

The bill that Gregory and Rozzi have poised for passage — a bill that has support from Senate President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Centre County, and Sen. Jay Costa, D-Forest Hills — is the kind of correction that could solve the problem. But holding the state’s largest universities hostage does not.

A better solution would be for Corman to apply pressure to Ward if he believes the bill would do the job. Gregory and Rozzi say they have enough senators to pass the bill by a 40-vote margin. That seems likely, as it cleared the House 152-49. If that’s true, those senators, especially the Republicans, should likewise push Ward in that direction.

Spreading the suffering helps no one. Using common sense and bipartisan agreement does.