Washington Watch: How Many Lobbyists Does It Take . . .

By Mark F. Smith and Ruth Flower

To gain congressional support for higher education? Quite a few, it seems. The AAUP works in coalition with forty-eight other higher-education associations that are members of the Washington Higher Education Secretariat (WHES). In Lobbying for Higher Education, Constance Cook reports that more than two hundred Washington, D.C., associations list higher education as their primary focus.1 

Many institutions also lobby on their own behalf; when they are added to the mix, they make up some of the eighteen-hundred members of the American Council on Education (ACE).

Representatives of these associations lobby independently on some issues and together on others; on some issues, they lobby "in parallel," seeking the same outcome, but emphasizing different perspectives. Informational meetings with each other, with experts, and with staff from congressional offices and the Department of Education help to keep the associations up to date on higher-education issues. Perhaps more important, the lobbyists rely on an informal network that operates by telephone, e-mail, and brief visits in the halls of Congress to seek one another’s support, ideas, and information on issues of concern to one or more association.

The AAUP’s challenge is to struggle to keep a faculty voice alive and clearly audible in this mix of associations. As a national organization of faculty, the AAUP offers two distinctive characteristics: we speak as the primary practitioners of higher education, and we have access to a broad "grassroots" base of individual voters around the country. These two strengths often give us a place at the table that might otherwise be reserved to larger associations with greater resources. The ACE, for example, with the weight of its eighteen-hundred institutional members, asserts that it "speaks as higher education’s voice in matters of public policy." When the ACE speaks, its voice is loud and clear, but it does not always include a faculty perspective.

The ACE coordinates the WHES. Several of the member organizations, including the AAUP, represent specific constituencies in the college arena, such as the Association of Community College Trustees and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. Other secretariat members are national policy and advocacy groups, such as the College Board and the American Association for Higher Education. Most of the members, however, represent subsets of institutions, such as the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Council of Graduate Schools.

The WHES operates in a set of concentric circles. The inner circle, known as the Big Six, includes the six organizations that, among themselves, represent the spectrum of higher-education institutions. In addition to the ACE, the group includes the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC), the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), the Association of American Universities (AAU), the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU), and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC). When speaking together, they provide a clear institutional viewpoint on issues in higher education.

On budget matters, such as student aid, funding for research, and general institutional aid, the AAUP’s interests usually coincide with those of our higher-education colleagues. We have joined with them in the Alliance for Student Aid and have worked in coalition on research and some copyright issues. For subjects like labor law reform, however, we join with a different set of coalition partners, because our interest in such areas usually does not mesh with those of the institutions.

In any of these coalitions, it is important for the AAUP to speak clearly from a faculty viewpoint. For example, in the recent campaign regarding public access to research data, we worked closely with many institutional and administrative partners. But often, the emphasis of our partners was on expense or bureaucratic hassles, while our emphasis was on academic freedom and privacy. In Washington, where strange allies are the norm, we often find ourselves on the same side of the table with those who might be opponents across different tables in different times. We work together where we can, and separately where we cannot. As Rabbi Hillel might have said about the voices speaking for higher education: "We are all the same in different ways, and we are all different in the same way."

1. Constance Ewing Cook, Lobbying for Higher Education: How Colleges and Universities Influence Federal Policy (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998). Back to text

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