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Government Relations: The Choices We Make
By Mark F. Smith
Over the past several years, faculty members who have lobbied state legislatures and the Congress for increased funding for higher education have been met with a common response, even from sympathetic and supportive legislators: “I’d love to help, but there just isn’t any money.” At the federal level, the problem is even more acute than at the state level as a result of new requests for money for the Iraq war and reconstruction following Hurricane Katrina. In fact, in mid-September, leaders of the Senate education committee proposed taking savings from college-aid programs to pay for hurricane relief.
One college lobbyist commented recently that he hoped the Senate wouldn’t cut student loans to pay for hurricane relief. He could cite political philosopher Leo Strauss in support of that attitude. During Strauss’s tenure at the University of Chicago, a department colleague asked him, “Given limited funds, which should get more, schools or hospitals?” Strauss answered unhesitatingly that schools should, “because education is more important than health.” Leaving aside whether one agrees with Strauss on this question, his answer reveals several important truths about education funding in today’s environment.First, the current level of education funding suggests limits to the domination of public policy by adherents of Strauss, despite the fact that numerous commentators have alleged that Straussians dominate policy making in the Bush administration. Second, pitting education against health funding reveals an unfortunate reality about federal spending procedures.Under current federal arrangements in which education and health programs are funded by the same appropriations bill—that for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education—education and health compete for the same limited set of scarce dollars. But they do not compete directly with military programs, farm price supports, or tax cuts. This fact makes the Senate education committee’s proposal unusual. Disaster relief through the Federal Emergency Management Agency is usually funded through a different legislative vehicle. Another college lobbyist complained that senators are considering using higher education funds for hurricane relief just because the Higher Education Act “happens to still be in their inbox.”
Ultimately, the funding levels of federal programs are based on political choices that legislators and policy makers determine. The claim that there is no money is a convenient way of avoiding responsibility for those choices. Individual legislators and policy makers acting collectively through legislatures and bureaucracies make decisions that determine the availability of money every day.
Resolving to cut taxes is a choice to lower revenues, which in turn is a decision to spend less money on programs. Reducing taxes benefits some members of the polity and forces a determination not to spend money on programs that help people in the same polity—but not necessarily the same members. Over the past four or five years, the Congress has made some choices well before it considered the final numbers in the appropriations bills. These decisions have precluded the level of funding for higher education that the Association has supported. For example, the choice to spend money on tax cuts, homeland security, and the military has prevented Congress from increasing the Pell Grant maximum award and otherwise strengthening student aid programs. The issue is not, however, that the government does not have money. Overall spending has gone up, and the government is larger now than when President Bush took office.
Traditionally, state and federal governments took pride in funding higher education, at least since the creation of land grant institutions. The GI Bill is one of the major public policy successes of modern times. But this support for the role of the state in higher education may well be eroding, with the burden of financing higher education shifting more and more to the student.
In 1910, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner defined the mission of the public university as “uplifting the state to continuously higher levels.” To do so, he said, “it must have the wisdom to make expenditures for results which pay manifold in the enrichment of civilization, but which are not immediate and palpable.” The job of faculty members is to make legislators and other government policy makers at the state and federal levels understand that wisdom. The desire to fund only the “immediate and palpable” has led to funding choices that jeopardize education and the future of our society.
Mark Smith is AAUP director of government relations.
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