People who control sources of funding also have major influence, and I’m sure they don’t use that influence in an ideal way, but it isn’t all bad for faculty/students. Reduce the funders influence and they may decide to stop funding.

Well, in my view we don’t have a choice between a university that makes political statements and one that doesn’t. Instead, we have a choice between a university whose political acts are managed by administrators and one whose politics are open to democratic campus input. You see, in my view things like “investing in Darfur” or “hiring a huge campus police force” or “building something on the former site of a community garden” are already political acts. The problem, from this perspective, is that the administration generally gets to implement whatever politics it wants, ignoring faculty and student input at will.

While I think its rather silly to pretend that a university can truly be apolitical, I wouldn’t want the faculty voting to endorse lots of political statements either.