Most academics are oblivious to federal legislation concerning higher education, especially authorizing legislation. We are more aware of appropriations measures, assuming we know the difference between authorization and appropriation (doubtful). Last week Congress passed the new Higher Education Act, the authorization legislation that sets out the broad parameters for federal support and regulation of higher education — but has no immediate budgetary impact. We will continue to fight annually for appropriations, but this Act sets out the broad parameters of federal higher-education policy.
Since (as I have noted before) the federal government has no specific constitutional role in the governance of higher education, the successive authorizing acts have an orthogonal relationship to our field — they do not constitute the field, but they certainly cannot be ignored. The legislation sometimes confers benefits upon us, sometimes punishes us, and it always structures federal funding. But, unlike Pogo, we cannot say that “we have met the enemy and he is us,” for there is no “us” in higher education in the United States. The field is so varied and complex that all generalizations about it are wrong. Which makes federal higher-education legislation even weirder, if one thinks about it. This Act, awaiting the president’s signature, took five years to see the light of day. It is, of course, the product of expensive lobbying, since legislation is increasingly up for sale and higher education is a large and wealthy industry.
Who were the winners and losers, at least for the liberal-arts colleges and universities? Well, I suppose you could say that “we” won in the provision barring the federal Department of Education from determining how we measure student learning (a response to the Spellings Commission threat) and possibly in the provision requiring textbook publishers to make public more pricing information, as well as in other respects. “We” lost in the provision crating a watch list for the most expensive colleges — if “we” is (like mine) the expensive colleges, and also in the provision siding with the entertainment industry in requiring institutions to take more responsibility for student music and video file sharing. “We” (only if we are state legislators) lost in the requirement that states maintain certain levels of annual expenditure for the support of public higher education. But of course many provisions that the institutions opposed are favorable to students as consumers, and it may be the generally consumerist orientation of this Act that marks an important sea change in federal higher-education legislation.
But there are other, hidden, winners and losers? Political conservatives won on three potentially important issues. One is the provision that Title VI (area studies) centers must now explain how they “will reflect diverse perspectives and a wide range of views. This is milder than the supervisory committee that conservatives have been seeking for many years, but it is potentially threatening to the independence of the centers. Second, this attitude is apparently reinforced by a “sense of Congress” statement on academic speech in the vein of David Horowitz’s “academic bill of rights.” The third is the provision promoted by the National Association of Scholars for support of centers devoted to teaching “traditional” American history. This language is actually similar to that in Senator Byrd’s major Teaching American History program (on which I lectured last September), but it may prove more effective in this form — if appropriations follow. I also noted an authorization of $20-million in 2009 (and $25-million in 2010) for Teach for America — a clear potential (appropriation?) for one of the country’s nonprofit educational goliaths. What is this doing in a higher education bill? (Ask their lobbyists.)
Who knows what else is hidden in this vast piece of legislation? Has anyone read it all?
