Thompson's Plans for Higher Education Remain Largely a Mystery

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By PAUL BASKEN

Fred Thompson, the son of a used-car dealer, struggled to pay his tuition bills in the 1960s and ended up relying heavily on federal student loans.

The experience built in him the lasting sense that government has a role to play in helping students afford college.

But, he quickly tells potential voters as he campaigns for president, not too big a role.

"We can certainly make it easier on people" to attend college, the former Tennessee senator told a crowd during a campaign stop in Newton, Iowa. He then added, "I don't think that we're in a position, or are ever going to be in a position, where we can guarantee everyone four years of college from the federal treasury."

For voters trying to decipher Mr. Thompson's positions on higher education, such inscrutable clues may be the firmest indication they get of what a Thompson administration might mean for colleges and universities.

Mr. Thompson has not been in elected office for several years, and he entered the 2008 presidential race late. That has left his campaign strategists time to focus on only a few key issues, none of which involve education, says Frederick M. Hess, director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a public-policy research group with which Mr. Thompson has been affiliated since leaving the Senate in 2003.

"The reality is that on all the details, I think that they're probably still very much in the thinking-through stage," Mr. Hess says.

John Geer, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University who has tracked Mr. Thompson's career, agrees. "Remember that Senator Thompson was not planning his life to run for president," Mr. Geer says, "so he has not advertised his views like some of his more ambitious rivals."

That's frustrating to campaign donors like David P. Stuhr, associate vice president for academic affairs at Fordham University.

"I'm waiting for him to say something" setting out his overall approach to higher education, says Mr. Stuhr, who made a $1,000 donation in June, when Mr. Thompson hadn't yet formally declared his candidacy. "I sent a contribution primarily because I was extremely unhappy with everybody else. And he becomes the default candidate."

Hunt for Red November

Mr. Thompson's campaign advisers, in response to a request from The Chronicle, said they could not offer any specific positions on higher-education matters.

"We are declining to make our policy people available to discuss the issue and will allow the senator to unveil his education policy on his own timeline," said a campaign spokesman, Darrel Ng.

Still, while spending the past few years as a television actor and occasional radio pundit, Mr. Thompson has found at least a few matters with which to find fault on college campuses.

In a June commentary for the ABC radio network, Mr. Thompson criticized a Marquette University professor for banning a student from posting on his door a column by the humorist Dave Barry that criticized the federal government as growing too "dangerous, powerful, and relentless" in its expansion of power.

"There was a time when American universities were known as havens of free speech, places where controversial ideas could be expressed and discussed," Mr. Thompson said in response to the Marquette professor's action. "Unfortunately, political correctness has crept into the halls of academia. Then it chained the doors and started duct-taping the mouths of anybody who voiced unapproved opinions."

In April, commenting on the shootings at Virginia Tech, Mr. Thompson said in his ABC broadcast that responsible adults should be allowed to carry weapons on college campuses to protect themselves, and criticized the university for lobbying against such legislation.

In other commentaries for the radio, Mr. Thompson urged the nation's colleges to pay more attention to the nursing shortage anticipated from the retirement of the baby-boom generation, and advocated more courses in military history, accusing colleges of avoiding an unpleasant subject in favor of liberal topics such as "third-wave feminism or colonial governmentality."

Allying himself with anti-abortion forces, he also has said that scientific research should be conducted on adult, not embryonic, stem cells.

No Stranger to Struggle

On the more fundamental issues of college costs and access, Mr. Thompson harks back to his upbringing in Lawrenceburg, Tenn., as the son of parents who quit school in the eighth grade to work on their family farms. In his own childhood, Mr. Thompson's family made ends meet by relying on his father's used-car business.

The future senator married and became a father as a teenager, then went to college by working and borrowing the maximum allowed under the federally guaranteed loan program, he told the crowd at his Newton campaign stop.

"I think I paid all that off about the same time that my first child started college," Mr. Thompson said, to sympathetic chuckles. The country still has more students who are struggling in that type of situation "than there are those whose daddy writes them a check," he said.

America therefore needs to be wary of creating "a large class of folks that can't go to school and haven't gotten an adequate education in a high-tech economy where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer," Mr. Thompson said.

"I'm not saying that that's the direction that we're headed in," he said, "but it could happen, and a part of the solution to that is better education, and the federal government has a role in that."

That government role, however, should be limited to helping students "through the rough spots," rather than providing the overall solution to college affordability, he said.

Another Thompson campaign contributor, Daniel H. Nielsen, a retired history instructor at Northern Marianas College, on Saipan, a U.S. possession in the Pacific, believes that such comments mean Mr. Thompson would bolster programs for disadvantaged students, including the federal TRIO programs.

"It's very clear to me that he does believe that" the government should help poor students, says Mr. Nielsen, an education adviser to Gov. Benigno R. Fitial, of the Northern Marianas, who once directed TRIO operations in the territory.

Mr. Greer, of Vanderbilt, says Mr. Thompson's stated commitment to fiscal restraint means "he's not going to have a lot of discretionary money for higher education." At the same time, Mr. Geer says, "he's not going to be somebody who views that as always on the chopping block."

Cow Tipping

Mr. Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, predicts that Mr. Thompson's history of tackling "sacred cows" may lead him to surprise higher-education leaders with an unexpected foray into a controversial issue, especially one that fits his profile as "a Reaganite cultural conservative."

Likely issues of concern for a President Thompson include the need for intellectual diversity on college campuses and for accountability in spending public funds, he said.

Conservatives like Mr. Thompson may be growing increasingly concerned about the federal government's reach into education policy with the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Hess says. But they do not necessarily see such approaches as a violation of their faith in market forces or local control, he said.

"There's a concern that institutions of higher education have been receiving this money without sufficient responsibility," Mr. Hess says. "So many conservatives don't see this as a federalist issue, but an issue of being accountable with dollars."