Government Relations: More Than the Market

By Mark F. Smith

Not surprisingly, given the market-driven sources of these changes, an antiregulatory rhetoric is being utilized to characterize these proposals. One example, the proposed repeal of "the twelve-hour rule," serves to make the point and to illustrate the complexities involved in repealing so-called burdensome regulations.

Congress created minimum-instruction-time requirements for higher education in the wake of well-publicized student-aid scandals during the 1980s. The Higher Education Amendments of 1992 defined an academic "year" as thirty weeks of instruction, but left the definition of a "week" to department regulation. For non-standard-term or nonterm programs, the department defined a week as a "consecutive seven-day period," which contains "at least twelve hours of regularly scheduled instruction or examinations." Standard-term weeks had to provide "at least one day of regularly scheduled instruction or examinations." Programs that met the twelve-hour rule or the "one-day rule" were eligible for federal student aid; those that did not, were not.

The development of Web-based distance education highlighted the difficulties of measuring education programs based on time, and proposals to eliminate the twelve-hour rule are being debated. Last October, the House passed HR 1992, "The Internet Equity and Education Act of 2001," proposing to repeal a number of regulations on student-aid programs, including the twelve-hour rule. The bill is currently in a Senate committee. Meanwhile, the department is proposing to repeal the twelve-hour rule through regulatory reform. The AAUP opposes both these efforts, because these changes should be considered within the context of the overall reauthorization of the Higher Education Act next year.

However, faculty need to be in-volved in the debate over these issues now. Over the last ten years, it has become increasingly clear that time is not the only, or even the best, way to quantify pursuit of higher education. Even aside from new delivery modes offered by new technologies, there are many ways of engaging fully in education that do not involve sitting in a classroom. But so far, no one has come up with an acceptable way to measure equivalency of effort and accomplishments across a variety of institutions, disciplines, and regions. As long as time is the basic component of the equation, the larger issues faced by nontraditional students and programs cannot be seriously addressed.

At the governmental policy-making level, the first need is to recognize the distinct roles different entities play and the different responsibilities those roles entail. The Department of Education plays a "consumer-protection" role in regard to national programs, ensuring that student-aid dollars designed to be used for higher education purposes are in fact used for such purposes. Accredit-ing agencies play a "quality-assurance" role in regard to institutions, determining an institution’s capacity to deliver a program of study in higher education, and, therefore, need to be empowered to strengthen their reviews of institutional quality. Faculty play a quality-assurance role in regard to course and program integrity. Faculty have responsibility on the campus level for fundamental educational issues such as curriculum, subject matter, methods of instruction, and requirements for degrees. But faculty members need to go beyond their individual activity in the classroom and their collective action within campus governance practices to ensure educational quality. They need to integrate campus-based activities with disciplinary research to keep their programs up to the highest academic standards.

Although many campuses and some commercial enterprises are currently engaged in conversations about these issues, they need to join together in a larger conversation about the overall role higher education plays in society. The Department of Education’s proposal to eliminate rules assumes that the market will provide adequate protection for students, innovation, and educational quality. However, in a climate where funding is already restricted, leaving issues such as educational quality to the market threatens to reduce higher education to the lowest common denominator. While the market works well in particular realms, the continued excellence of our higher education enterprise in an economy based on knowledge and information requires more than the market. It requires that all segments of the higher education community fulfill their appropriate professional responsibilities.

Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.

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