By Richard Ekman

As the federal government increases its involvement in our lives, the debate one might expect about this trend—between liberals who favor big government and conservatives who favor free enterprise—is not raging around us. The usual positions, it seems, have shifted. The shift began long ago. When LBJ’s Great Society was being legislated, it was clear that the federal government was stepping in because other entities had failed to address certain problems. I remember feeling proud of “my” government’s boldness, little worried that the national government may have been exceeding its authority. The egregious lack of equal opportunity in jobs, schools, and housing for Americans in many states, and the disinclination of businesses or state governments to right these wrongs, seemed justification enough for federal intervention.
    Since the 1960s, Americans have continued to believe that free enterprise and its philanthropic offshoots ought to be the mainstays of social institutions. Only when the private sector has demonstrated that it cannot meet a need do most people believe government should intervene. We prefer to rely on for-profit entities, NGOs, or local and state government agencies rather than the behemoth in Washington.
    The Great Society sparked much idealism. Into the middle ranks of the federal civil service came large numbers of people who saw government service as a way to change their country rather than merely serve it. Today’s senior generation of activist, mid-level federal employees includes many who began work in the 1960s and 1970s and who are not reluctant to use the authority of government to address social issues.
    Even Richard Nixon’s election, thought at the time to be a repudiation of much of the Great Society, was followed by a further expansion of the federal workforce and significant increases in appropriations in areas of “unnecessary” government such as education and the arts. Stereotypes of conservative and liberal views no more fit the partisan alignments of the 1960s and 1970s than they do the major party platforms of 2004.
    Our views of the federal role in higher education have evolved as well. Until the mid-19th century, American higher education was almost completely nongovernmental, a patchwork of colleges and universities founded by groups of private citizens for specific purposes or by religious denominations. As the institutions created by the Morrill Act grew, college-going by Americans also increased. The wave of veterans in college following the Second World War was financed by the federal government and, from 1945 to 2004, the rhetoric for government support of higher education gradually changed. We now talk about making college possible for all Americans and, in fact, an extraordinary two-thirds of all high school graduates do enter tertiary education. Private colleges and universities now devote enormous sums of privately raised financial aid to students from low-income backgrounds. State governments have created new campuses—especially since the 1960s.
    One consequence of the view that college is for all people is that when a college does not perform well, it is not clear who ought to be most wrought up about it. With dismal graduation rates at many public universities and colleges, state legislators understandably ask about the effective use of state money. When college graduates lack the rudiments of “cultural literacy,” parents and employers are equally dissatisfied.
    Lately, federal officials have acted as though it is their job to fix these problems. Some in Congress wish to legislate the content of the college curriculum and the politics of the faculty. Some officials wish to deny federal aid to colleges based on low graduation rates. Some wish to impose price controls. Some federal officials even want to make the government’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) into a kind of super-registrar’s office, maintaining records on each and every college student.
    There are many reasons why these proposals are worrisome. The first is that these are all incursions into an aspect of American life that for more than 200 years has functioned very well without direct federal regulation. Yet, the shortcomings of higher education today (our performance is hardly perfect) are not so severe as to justify federalization of higher education. This is not a situation analogous to the lack of civil rights in Mississippi in the 1960s.
    Second, excellent devices to measure the performance of colleges already exist, and they are nongovernmental. Instruments such as the National Survey of Student Engagement and RAND’s Collegiate Learning Assessment are very useful to external observers and the colleges themselves. No one in Congress, as far as I know, has argued that the existing tools of assessment are inadequate, so it is not clear why anyone should want an additional, governmental regimen.
    Third, the NCES proposal is based on the flawed view that a string of separate courses taken by individual students offers the best way to understand the results of college study. But the results of a college education are more than the sum of separate courses. General education, extracurricular activities, explicit values of the college’s founders that shape institutional ethos, and senior “capstone” courses, for example, all shape the skills and civic outlook of the new graduate. Federal proposals to force colleges to accept transfer credits for all courses offered elsewhere or to keep all American college student records in a central location fail to acknowledge some basic truths about what makes our colleges so successful.
    Fourth, the sad fact is that when the federal government gets involved in an aspect of American life, the regulatory instruments usually prove to be heavy-handed and expensive. The record-keeping requirements, especially for small colleges, of an individual-student-level database would be prohibitively expensive. Indeed, the history of the U.S. Department of Education, begun with such idealism less than a generation ago, shows that it doesn’t take long for a federal program to become encrusted with extra requirements.
    Fifth, once federalized, there is more risk that higher education will become politicized. Look at the federally-run universities in Europe or South America. Politicians often appoint rectors, who are then fired when ruling parties change. Even more extreme are cases where faculty members lose their jobs if they are out of favor with the government, as happens today in much of the Middle East and former Soviet countries. The occasional U.S. governor who appoints a political crony to head a state university is a trivial setback in comparison with the prospect of national political control of colleges.
    A sixth worry is that a federal monolith will have only one viewpoint. The distinctive strength of American higher education is that it is diverse. Each state has, for good reasons, set somewhat different expectations for its public colleges, and the independent sector of higher education offers an array of options spanning many philosophies of education, values, beliefs, and curricular programs.
    I do not doubt the sincerity of politicians who argue that the risks I have cited would never materialize, but I believe that such sincerity is not informed by the lessons of history. I can remember when all government officials said that a social security number would never be used for any other purpose, that the U.S. would never have a system of national identification numbers. But we are well on the way to just that. Any NCES database would soon become available to other parts of government, we can be certain.
    An even more pertinent example exists in the recent history of education. Only four years ago, all the regional accrediting associations would, at the drop of a hat, defend the principle of preserving a completely independent, voluntary, nongovernmental system of institutional accreditation. Now some of these same organizations are championing a “blended” approach in which the regional organizations and the federal government would jointly accredit colleges. Our tendency to amnesia may also explain why some of the national higher education associations are supporting the NCES proposal, oblivious to the recent battles to preserve the twin bedrock principles of institutional autonomy and privacy of individual students’ records. NAICU deserves our support for opposing the NCES proposal.
    It is also worth noting, but of little comfort, that the push for federalization is not limited to higher education, but extends to philanthropic foundations as well. The Senate Finance Committee is now discussing the regulation of foundations; the parallels to the proposals to regulate higher education are strong. It is mystifying why the federal government would want to discourage the largesse of wealthy individuals who have chosen to use their fortunes not for personal luxuries but to address important social needs that the government would otherwise need to use tax dollars to address.
    Can we recall a social order that relies largely on the voluntary deployment of wealth to create institutions that serve the public good, reserving the role of the federal government for those things that are clearly unachievable through nongovernmental institutions? Or will our flawed memory of the Great Society’s legacy continue to lead the national government to compete with—and sometimes overwhelm—state, local, and independent institutions?