Cite as: 524 U. S. 569 (1998)
Souter, J., dissenting
dicate[s] that scarcity would give the State the right to exercise viewpoint discrimination that is otherwise impermissible." Ibid.; see also Arkansas Ed. Television Comm'n v. Forbes, 523 U. S. 666, 676 (1998) (scarcity of air time does not justify viewpoint-based exclusion of candidates from a debate on public television; neutral selection criteria must be employed). If the student activities fund at issue in Rosenberger had awarded competitive, merit-based grants to only 50%, or even 5%, of the applicants, on the basis of "journalistic merit taking into consideration the message of the newspaper," it is obvious beyond peradventure that the Court would not have come out differently, leaving the University free to refuse funding after considering a publication's Christian perspective.10
A word should be said, finally, about a proposed alternative to this failed analogy. As the Solicitor General put it
NEA, ante, at 585, is therefore misdirected. It is not to the point that the Government necessarily makes choices among competing applications, or even that its judgments about artistic quality may be branded as subjective to some greater or lesser degree; the question here is whether the Government may apply patently viewpoint-based criteria in making those choices.
10 Justice Scalia suggests that Rosenberger turned not on the distinction between government-as-speaker and government-as-facilitator-of-private-speech, but rather on the fact that "the government had established a limited public forum." Ante, at 599. Leaving aside the proper application of forum analysis to the NEA and its projects, I cannot agree that the holding of Rosenberger turned on characterizing its metaphorical forum as public in some degree. Like this case, Rosenberger involved viewpoint discrimination, and we have made it clear that such discrimination is impermissible in all forums, even nonpublic ones, Cornelius v. NAACP Legal Defense & Ed. Fund, Inc., 473 U. S. 788, 806 (1985), where, by definition, the government has not made public property generally available to facilitate private speech, Perry Ed. Assn. v. Perry Local Educators' Assn., 460 U. S. 37, 46 (1983) (defining a nonpublic forum as "[p]ublic property which is not by tradition or designation a forum for public communication"). Accordingly, Rosenberger's brief allusion to forum analysis was in no way determinative of the Court's holding.
615
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