A public university in Colorado may have violated state law by offering students course credit if they volunteered with President Obama’s re-election campaign. A blog post on the Adams State University website billed the opportunity as a “12 week long organizing internship for the Obama Campaign.”
Both the blog post and the course are now gone. The course was canceled due to lack of interest, according to the university. The blog post was taken down earlier this week after a conservative student blog, Campus Reform, reported on it.
The course may have been in violation of the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act, which prohibits the use of public resources toward “campaigns involving the nomination, retention, or election of any person to any public office.” Oliver Darcy, the editor at Campus Reform who first reported the story, said the course struck him as a likely violation of state law.
“They are definitely using a few professors at least to help these students with the campaign process, so I don’t understand how it doesn’t use public resources for campaign purposes,” he said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
A spokesperson for the university said the blog post was mistaken about the nature of the course, and that students would have been allowed to volunteer with any campaign.
“This is an independent study course that would be available to any student in any campaign,” said Julie Waechter, a spokesperson for ASU, in an interview with TheDC News Foundation.
Waechter declined to give the name of the employee who authorized the course. Dodie Day, the administrator who posted the blog entry, declined to comment.
Both the blog post and the course are now gone. The course was canceled due to lack of interest, according to the university. The blog post was taken down earlier this week after a conservative student blog, Campus Reform, reported on it.
The course may have been in violation of the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act, which prohibits the use of public resources toward “campaigns involving the nomination, retention, or election of any person to any public office.” Oliver Darcy, the editor at Campus Reform who first reported the story, said the course struck him as a likely violation of state law.
“They are definitely using a few professors at least to help these students with the campaign process, so I don’t understand how it doesn’t use public resources for campaign purposes,” he said in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.
A spokesperson for the university said the blog post was mistaken about the nature of the course, and that students would have been allowed to volunteer with any campaign.
“This is an independent study course that would be available to any student in any campaign,” said Julie Waechter, a spokesperson for ASU, in an interview with TheDC News Foundation.
Waechter declined to give the name of the employee who authorized the course. Dodie Day, the administrator who posted the blog entry, declined to comment.
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