THE UNIVERSITY AND THE STATE
A Lecture By
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.)
on the Occasion of the 100th Anniversary of
The Columbia University Graduate School

New York, New York

September 30, 1980
On July 3, 1980, James A. Dinnan, professor of education
at the University of Georgia, surrendered in his academic
robes to federal marshals at the Bibb County Jail in Macon,
Georgia, to begin .a prison sentence for contempt of court.
Judge Wilbur D. Owens had cited him for contempt for refusing
to tell how he voted in the decision of a faculty committee
that had declined to recommend tenure to a younger colleague.
To Dinnan's mind the most fundamental process of academic
self-governance was at issue: the decision as to who will
teach, and most especially the choice of persons to be given
lifetime teaching appointments. Judge Owens did not see it
that way. In remarks from the bench he compared the closed
proceeding of the tenure committee to the "blackball" system
of the campus fraternities, which he had known as an under-
graduate at the university.

A generation ago, the jailing of a professor asserting
the integrity of traditional academic procedures would have
aroused great alarm and protest. Professor Dinnan, however,
was sentenced in silence. His colleagues have helped some,
and there has been some remonstrance. But, as in Conan
Doyle's Silver Blaze, the curious thing is that the dog did
not bark.

Not, of course, ultimately curious. As Sherlock Holmes
deduced and as we may do, the participants in the encounter
were familiar with one another. At the King's Pyland stables

in Devonshire, the dog knew the trainer. In Athens, Georgia,
Page 2

the university faculty and administration were on equally
familiar terms with the federal regulations that gave rise to
the case of Professor Dinnan. In this particular instance those
relating to sex discrimination under Title VII of the

Civil Rights Act of 1964 as amended by the Equal Employment

Opportunity Act of 1972.

zxkek*

The federal writ routinely extends to the internal pro-
cesses of the campuses. Under provisions of Executive Order
11246, issued in September 1965, the Secretary of Labor --
in discharging his duty to assure that Organizations (includ-
ing universities) receiving federal contracts not discrin-
inate in hiring -- routinely requires compliance reports from
contractors, and is authorized to make further investiga-
tions, including examination of "books, records, and ac-
counts" to ascertain compliance.i/ Such compliance reviews
are reguired for any organization awarded a federal contract
of at least $1 million.

In a long-standing dispute between the University of
California at Berkeley and the Department of Labor that con-
cerns the right of such federal officials to copy and remove
from campus confidential internal university records pertain-
ing to faculty hiring and tenure decisions, Secretary Ray

Marshall ordered on September 4, 1980, that the university is:
Page 3

...hereby preliminarily and permanently pro-
hibited from refusing to allow complainant to
remove copies of said books, records, accounts,
and other materials, from the University of.
California, Berkeley, campus, or from any other
place at which they are maintained.

--.{BAnd that the university's] vresent

Government contracts and subcontracts be canceled,
terminated or suspended and that respondent be

declared ineligible from further contracts and
subcontracts, and from extensions or modifi-
cations of any existing contracts and subcon-
tracts, until such time that it can satisfy the
Director of OFCCP [Office of Federal Contract
Compliance Programs] that it is in compliance
with Executive Order 11246 and the Secretary's
regulations issued purSuant thereto, which I |
have found to have been violated in this case.2/

In the end the University of California settled for such
terms as it could get: it had no choice, certainly.

Only a few weeks earlier, over "bitter academic oppo-
sition," as reported by Science, the journal of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the
Office of Management and Budget imposed complex new account+
ing rules for federally sponsored research carried out on
university campuses. The most onerous of these regulations
established procedures by which universities must keep track
of the time and effort of their professors so as to ensure
that the federal government pays only for those activities
that are integral to federally sponsored research projects.
Circular A-21 (Cost Principles for Educational Institutions)

states that:

Each report will account for 100 percent of-°

the activity for which the employee is compen-
Sated and which is required in fulfillment of
the employee's obligations to the institution. 3/
Page 4

Stanford University estimates that this will increase the
number of reports that it must send to Washington from 3,000
to 80,000 a year. Science reports that:

After OMB rejected the final bid for renego-
tiation this summer, university strategists
speculated that a spontaneous reaction by fac-
ulty against the reporting requirements might
carry weight with OMB. But despite formal pro-
tests against the revised A-21 by the National
AcacGemy of Sciences and other organizations and
Scattered declarations from university depart-
ments of intentions not to sign the forms, no
faculty rebellion materialized. 47

This time the dog eventually barked. A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of
Yale University, spoke to the Association of Yale Alumni,de-

ploring the "mounting wave of regulation" and "requirements

for massive amounts of paperwork" associated with government

grants. There is, he continued, "a powerful resentment on

all sides, and distrust. A radical skepticism bordering on

open contempt for our centers of learning surfaces again. ">/

But the regulations had gone into effect, and one must ask

the President of Yale: Whence cometh this radical skepticism

bordering on contempt?

A vast transformation took place in the position of
universities in the United States in the fifteen-year period
between 1957 and 1972. Before then, the federal government
had but little role in their support, and none whatever in
their governance. Since then, all is changed, especially at
the great research institutions. Between a Quarter and a

half of the budgets of such universities as Columbia, Stan-

ford, and Harvard now come from federal funds; at least half
Page 5

their undergraduates and graduates receive some federal as-
Sistance. This extension of aid has been accompanied by ever
more detailed application of federal rules and regulations
from various executive departments and agencies. Simul-
taneously, federal courts are increasingly involved with the
internal processes of universities, in-a pattern now familiar
in elementary and secondary school systems. A judge forced
to determine whether there has been discrimination in effect
decides who shall have tenure.

All this has come as something of a shock. In the
main, the university community was most Supportive of the
government activism that is now affecting it. in a greater
or lesser degree the universities politicized themselves in
the 1960s, demariding a wide range of government intervention
in the society at large, which is only now reaching them.

Not all this intervention is to be lamented. To the con-
trary. I was an Assistant Secretary of Labor in the adminis-
tration of Lyndon B. Johnson and helped prepare Executive
Order 11246 on Equal Employment Opportunity. This continues
to be the basis of the affirmative action programs of the
federal government. it was directed against a specific evil]
and has accomplished much good. But there was not a soul in
the executive branch fifteen years ago who would have dreamed
the day would come when the federal courts would require a
census in which all employees and judicial officers be clas-
sified by "race/national origin groups." This includes the "distinct

subgroups", "Arabic" and "Hebrew." This was just the sort of
Page 6

thing we assumed we were working against.* Similarly, a good
deal of the "confidentiality"that surrounds university de-
cisions on Matters such as tenure is a Victorian legacy that
invites abuse and needs opening up. (Indeed, in the Middle
Ages such decisions were made in public and with public par-
ticipation, it being assumed that the community at large had
a right to pass on decisions as to who would be teaching and
what.) But this is only one aspect of a more general regu-
latory regime that is much the same with respect to any ac-
tivity heavily dependent on federal money. What is unusual

1s the pained surprise to which it now gives rise. A notable

example was the article published in The Public Interest

 

in 1980 by Derek Bok, president of Harvard University:

..-it is not my purpose merely to complain about the
delays and inconveniences of public regulation but to
explore the more serious problems that arise when the
government seeks to influence basic academic functions:
what Justice Frankfurter once described as "the 'four
essential freedoms' of a university -- to determine for
itself on academic ground who may teach, what may be
taught, how it should be taught, and who may be admitte
to study." | -

Universities have worked for generations to establish
their autonomy over academic affairs, and Frankfurter
plainly spoke for all of higher education when he de-
clared: "For society's good, political power must ab-
stain from instrusion(sic) into this activity of freedom,
except for reasons that are exigent and obviously compel-
ling." Despite these works, each of the university's
"four essential freedoms" has become the subject of
increasing federal scrutiny and regulation....

* This order was issued by the Administrative Office of the
United States Courts on August 22, 1980. On September 26
a further notice stated:

Additionally, it has been determined that
the breakdown of the category "white" to reflect
the semitic subgroups (designated as "Arabic"
and "Hebrew") will not be necessary.... That
breakdown was requested in anticipation of a

possibility that it might be needed in the
future.&
Page 7

These issues are not simply matters of pri-
vate concern to colleges and universities. They
are important to the nation as well, for higher
education is not merely another fragment in the
vast mosaic of national life. Thus, our task is
not merely to strike a proper balance between
public needs and the private interest of the
academy, but to decide how government and uni-
versities can work in harmony so that higher
education will make its greatest contribution to
the welfare of society. And that is where the
problem lies. Because higher education has
become so central to our culture government is
more and more inclined to intervene..., 7/

President Bok's protest, eloquent and compelling though
it may be, came too late. The conditions that he protested
were set between 1957 and 1972. It was at least possible
during that period of transformation for the universities to
have negotiated a favored relationship between themselves and
the national government. It was not to be hoped that they
could retain the near autonomy that British universities
seemingly have managed to preserve into the age of government
subvention. But it was possible to provide that universities
be recognized as special institutions, that since they are
not miniatures of the polity they cannot be expected to per-
form well if burdened by the regulations subjected to the
polity at large.

In particular it was to be hoped that the research uni-
versities would establish their special needs as a proper

claim upon the national government. Foremost of these was

their need for institutional support: funds applied to the
Page 8

universities, without specific tasks or requirements at-
tached, in recognition of their existence as part of the
national interest. Only with institutional support from Wash-
ington could the fifty or so campuses that perform nearly all
of the basic research carried out in the United States -- and
that train succeeding generations of scientists and scholars
-~ be able to maintain the academic excellence of a diverse
student body in an egalitarian era disposed to mistake selec-
tivity for elitism.

That this was not done involved a profound failure of
leadership. No one spoke when there was still time. That some
do so now only calls attention to the previous passivity. It
is important for such protests to be registered, and on the
Margin they have some effect. But there should be no mistaking
the extent to which universities are now wards of the State
and that there is no undoing it.

xkx* isk

This is my principal theme. In the event that it does
not arouse sufficient ire, let me offer a subtheme that is quite
openly intended to provoke. I will contend that there were
political scientists who noticed this happening and to a degree
understood it. What is more, some warned against it. Had
they been heeded things might have come out better.

It is precisely because of the skepticism my proposition
is likely to evoke that I think it important to present it.

Political scientists study the state. If we do not know all
Page 9

there is to know about it, we know some things, and they are
worth knowing. The cohort of university presidents -- physicists
and classicists and assorted aesthetes -- who were running
American universities during the period of which I speak could
have learned from us. The lawyers, who now take over, such

has been the damage, might do worse than consider this.

A declaration of interest is in order here. It happens
that in 1959, then teaching at Syracuse University, I wrote
what I believe to be the first critique of the National Defense
Education Act of 1958. This legislation was the first of
the three great enactments that tied the university to the
State in America. I wrote at the time that this process had
begun, and warned that the direction it was taking would lead
to about the condition we are in today. It wasn't that hard
to foresee. Thereafter, I was marginally involved in assembling
the Higher Education Act of 1965, and saw that enterprise --
the second great enactment -- deepen the trend of government
intervention in higher education. In 1970 I wrote the Presi-
dential Message that led to the Education Amendments of 1972,
the third decisive enactment of this transformation. I hoped
at the time to be able to modify the direction of events. I
failed. But I did try, and I did warn.

The transformation, which begins with the National Defense
Education Act of 1958, was yet another response to the Soviet
launching of the "Sputnik" satellite the previous year. Ina
paper presented to a meeting of the University Centers for
Rational Alternatives in 1976, William J. McGill, then presi-

dent of Columbia University, noted the similarities and
Page 10

differences between the budget difficulties he was facing
(which included finding $1 million for federal paperwork) for
the coming academic year, and those his predecessor had faced

half a century earlier:

Nicholas Murray. Butler's budget for Columbia

University in 1928 had no government money in it at
all, whereas nearly one-third of my budget in 1978

will be paid for in Washington. 8/
What had intervened, he said, was

-..the federal government's decision to turn to the

Major research universities for a unique kind of

public service. We were given stewardship over the

nation's expanded commitment to basic research and

advanced teaching. The threshold was passed in

1957 when the Soviets launched their Sputnik beep-

ing to the world its message of technological

Superiority. After Sputnik our involvement with

government initiatives in higher education, and

our dependence on federal funds for expansion of

our facilities and our mission, was such that no

major American university would ever be the same

again.?/

This was an accurate statement, but it need not have been
quite so positive-seeming. The public service involved --
bailing out an administration that found itself in embarrassing
political circumstances -—- was perhaps not so unigue as might
appear to those never previously put to such uses.

In the article I wrote in 1959 -- and which from this
distance I will grant was perhaps more hortatory than analytic
~- I set forth the principal characteristics of the momentous
enactment we recall as the National Defense Education Act.

It will be recalled that the N.D.E.A. resolved the long-
Standing dispute over federal aid to higher education, a dis-

pute conducted along traditional liberal-conservative lines.

Following the launching of Sputnik, a conservative Eisenhower
Page ll

administration proposed such a program, and a liberal Congress,
with many variations of its own, enacted it. Higher education
appeared to have won a victory, and had done so, but, I argued,
there was a cost. Education in effect assumed the blame for
the political failure of the Eisenhower administration to devote
enough resources to beat the Russians into space. But there
was nothing the least deficient in U.S. technology at the time.
The country simply was not devoting its resources to this par-
ticular task. And so political deception was present from the
beginning.

in outlining the provisions of the act, I noted three
features. First, the principal benefits went to students rather
than institutions. Second, that for all the talk of major
research universities, institutional benefits were distributed
to many schools, following the dictates of Congressional
politics, rather than being concentrated on the large research
centers. And both these patterns have remained permanent.

Third, the act instituted a loyalty oath and affidavit
for all beneficiaries, and a particularly odious one at that.
For the first time, belief, as against Overt action, was made
grounds for governmental sanction, withal the somewhat negative
sanction of withholding benefits. Section 101(f) of the act

stated:

No part of any funds appropriated or othe vise ma
available for expenditure under authority o fhis a

Act shall be used to make payments or loans to any
individual unless such individual (1) has executed
and filed with the Commissioner an affidavit that

he does not believe in, and is not a member of and
Page 12

does not support any organization that believes in
or teaches, the overthrow of the United States
Government by force or violence or by any illegal
or unconstitutional methods, and (2) has taken and
Subscribed to an oath or affirmation in the follow-
ing form: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm). that

I will bear true faith and allegiance to the United
States of America and will support and defend the
Constitution and laws of the United States against
all its enemies, foreign and domestic..."10/

In the course of my inquiries I had learned that the loyalty
oath was not at all the work of Senator Barry Goldwater as
was generally alleged. It was, rather, the work of a staff
member thinking -- wrongly -- that it would make a favorable
impression on the Senator. At the time I made too little of
the role of Congressional staff in these matters. But then
that role was just beginning.

But the most significant aspect of the N.D.E.A. was that
the universities themselves played no significant role in
either its conception or enactment. It was an act of state
done for reasons of state. I observed: .

Almost to a man the educators, high and low across

the nation sat silent and passive while the vast

machinery of the establishment set about manufactur-

ing evidence that the schoolteachers were to blame

for Sputnik. Indeed, the.educators themselves began

. confessing their guilt -- and asking funds wherewith

to mend their ways.

---A kinder explanation would be that many edu-
cators saw through the administration stratagem but
took their beating in the expectation that before it
was over, they would be kicked into the trough of ll
federal aid. And this is precisely what happened. 21/

This tentative conclusion has been reinforced by more

recent analysts. The political scientist Lauriston R. King
Page 13

wrote in his 1975 book The Washinaton Lobbyists for Higher

Education:

The institutions played a negligible role in shap-
ing policies of direct benefit to themselves or
their student constituents. Instead they willingly
accommodated national policy by providing men and
resources to carry out the objectives of the
government, 12/

Norman C. Thomas, professor of political science et the
University of Cincinnati, observed in his 1975 work, Education

in National Politics, that:

 

In the rationale for NDEA, national security
was the end, education the means.13/

The silence from the academy was again notable in the
Higher Education Act of 1965, the next large enactment in this
field. In 1965, I was a member of the subcabinet in the
Johnson administration, and while My involvement in the Higher
Education Act of that year was peripheral, I was depressed by
the repetition of the pattern that tied the universities
closer to the government. I had been a member of the task
force established by President Kennedy that later drew up for
President Johnson the program that came to be known as the war
On poverty. I now watched the universities pressed into that
conflict, much as they had been summoned to the space wars of
the previous decade.

The centerpiece of the 1965 legislation was the first

program of federal grant aid to needy undergraduate students:

m

Educational Opportunity Grants. The Grants were to go to per-

sons "who for lack of financial means...would be unable to
Page 14

obtain" the "benefit of higher education. "14/ Helping them
to go to college was one of the several means by which the
federal government was then seeking to lift them out of
poverty.

Other provisions of the Higher Education Act included
federal insurance for student loans obtained from private
lenders, categorical assistance for college libraries, aid
for "developing" fin the main, black) institutions, creation
of the National Teachers Corps, and a new program of federal
assistance with equipment costs for colleges seeking to improve
undergraduate instruction.

These were and are excellent programs. They are, however,
fairly narrow ones, and they represent the polity's choice,
as it were, rather than the university's choice. No money
was Made available for the universities to do with as they
thought best: to experiment with new things; perhaps, more
important, to preserve old ones. As Lawrence Gladieux

a

and Thomas Wolanin observe in their 1976 book, Congress and the
Colleges,

The tradition of categorical programs for specific
federal purposes was continued. 15/

A practice of but seven years standing had already become a
tradition!

The universities had little to do with the writing of this
legislation. The White House staff put together the President's
proposal and the Congressional leadership enacted it. It

was done in that surge of legislative activity in 1965 directed
Page 15

toward social equality. Universities were instruments of these
social goals, much as. were the elementary and secondary schools
~- which in 1965 for the first time became beneficiaries of
federal aid -- but again on terms dictated by the antipoverty

agenda.

That this approach to federal higher education policy posed
risks for higher education did not go altegether unnoticed by
university administrators. In December, 1965, at a Conference
on New Federal Education Programs sponsored by the American
Council on Education, Keith Spalding, a social scientist who
had been president of Franklin and Marshall College for two
years (and who, fifteen years later, is still the distinguished
president of that distinguished liberal arts institution) got

it exactly right:

in more cases than not, the institution is re-

. quired to tailor its program to the guidelines
established by the national granting agency. With
a slight adjustment here, a minor compromise there,
the institution will get the grant. Then it may
find itself committed to a program that makes not
quite the demands it expected on its resources, or
engages those resources in an unbalancing way.

The federal dollar is tempting, and in the absence
of other means to mount an important project, the
compromises become easier and easier to make....
Most federal legislation is written in accordance
with norms that cannot take institutional
differences into account....Moreover, the whole
concept of accountability contains requirements
unfamiliar to private institutions....With govern-
ment money becoming available for library acquisi-
tions, scholarships, special programs, and operating
purposes, some of the special privileges that go

with private status may no longer be legitimately
claimed....16/

But his was almost a lone voice. In the main, the leadership

of higher education did not speak up, nor did it perceive the
Page 16

extent to which the government could manipulate higher educa-
tion. |

Five years later, in 1970, it fell to me, as a member of
the Cabinet, to draft a Presidential Message on Higher Educa-
tion. This was the first Presidential message ever to be
devoted exclusively to this subject: an event not without note
in itself. In 1970, there was also intense politicization
of university life, and so I undertook to do what perhaps
could not be done: to propose, on the part of the State, that
universities be enabled, or at least encouraged, to resist the
intrusions of government.

This to be sure was a somewhat interstitial message. The
principal theme of the President's message was that the federal
government should guarantee every American youth access to
higher education with what are now known as Basic Educational
Opportunity Grants, or Pell Grants, named for the distinguished
Senator from Rhode Island, Claiborne Pell, who continues his.
incomparable service as chairman of the Subcommittee on
Education, Arts and Humanities. This proposal was a natural,
even predictable development from the 1958 and 1965 legislation,
in effect a proposal to universalize the principles enbodied in
the earlier enactments: federal aid to needy students, with
the universities again instruments of federal purpose, in this
case the general objective of equalizing opportunities. The
progression, from a limited program of loans through a limited
program of grants to a vast program of direct student assistance

for all who want it is a familiar one in social policy.
Page 17

With respect to institutions, however, I hoped for some-
thing different. It was clear that the major research univer-
sities were becoming heavily dependent on the federal government
-~ not least because half were and are private, meaning they
had few resources of the state to summon. In 1959, I had
observed of N.D.E.A. that:

.-.-the priorities of education are being decided
in congressional committees and Washington bureaus
on the all too familiar basis of the exigencies

of the moment.

...The danger is that we will go on pretending
that federal control does not exist and that con-
sequently control will be hidden, [and] will be
exercised by people who are inadequate to the
responsibility...17/

Following a 1968 recommendation of the Carnegie Commission on
Higher Education, the President's 1970 message proposed -estab-
lishment of a National Foundation for Higher Education to
address this difficulty. The message to Congress was explicit
enough:

The crisis in higher education at this time is
more than simply one of finances. It has to

do with the uses to which the resources of higher
education are put, as well as the amount of those
resources, and it is past time the Federal govern-
ment acknowledged its own responsibility for bring-
ing about, through the forms of support it has
given and the conditions of that support, a

serious distortion of the activities of our centers
of academic excellence.

For three decades now the Federal government has
been hiring universities to do work it wanted done.
In far the greatest measure, this work has been in
the national interest, and the nation is in the
debt of those universities that have so brilliantly
performed it. But the time has come for the
Federal government to help academic communities
to pursue excellence and reform in fields of their own
choosing as well, and by means of their own choice.18/
Page 18

The National Foundation (with a beginning budget of $200
million a year) was to be a free-standing agency somewhat akin
to Britain's University Grants Commission, with "a semi-
autonomous board and director appointed by the President."

Its stated mission was:

_ To provide a source of ‘funds for the support
of excellence, new ideas and reform in higher
education, which could be given out on the basis
of the quatity of the institutions and programs
concerned. 19.

Two years of Congressional hearings and debate followed.
In the end the Education Amendments of 1972 included almost all
of the President's 1970 proposals -- with the single and con-
Spictous exception of the National Foundation for Higher Edu-
cation. It was not adopted by Congress because it was rejected
by the universities it was intended to help. The rejection
was instantaneous, and on the edge vehement.

Here there is something further to be said on behalf of
political science. There is a life cycle of political issues.
This is a matter not much investigated as yet, but anyone who
studies legislatures or elections will have sensed the pattern.
Or several patterns; I make no explicit claim. The art of the
politician is to be able to recognize an issue whose time has
come, and one whose time has passed. In 1970, despite appear-
ances, higher education was about to drop sharply on the polit-
ical agenda of the nation. The President's education proposals
were in the nature of a rounding out, a finishing up of a period

of intense legislative activity. The United States had reached
Page 19

the moon, the war on poverty was institutionalized. - Moreover,
the post World War II baby boom was through school, just about
out of college. Enrollments thereafter would level off and
even decline. After fifteen years at center stage, the manage-
ment of higher education programs and legislation was clearly
going to become just another routine function of the govern-
Ment.

The leaders of higher education evinced little sense of
this. They extrapolated the rising interest shown in them and
their universities since the late 1950s and assumed it would
rise indefinitely. There was not the least sense that an
opportunity to determine the relationship between academe and
the government was being presented them that would not come
again.

It should have been obvious. For my part I spent the
remainder of 1970 (at the end of which I would return to teach-
ing) trying to persuade the leadership that this was obvious.
But this effort seemed only to arouse suspicion. Clearly there
was a failure of advocacy on my part; but just as clearly this
was not a subject with which academic leaders were equipped to
deal. Government was, in truth, something new to them.

In October 1970, I spoke to the annual meeting of the
American Council on Education in St. Louis. "What," I asked,
referring to the proposal for the National Foundation, "impedes
the passage of this historic legislation?" For at the time,

as I saw it, the response to our proposal could only "be
Page 20

described as indifference in the Congress and embarrassed
silence or even suspicion in the world of higher education."

Several possible explanations for the reticence suggested
themselves, but none more strongly than the actual experience
I had had between March, when the President set forth his
proposals, and October, when I spoke:

Quite serious efforts by the President ana

members of the Cabinet and White House staff to ex-
plain the proposal and to elicit either support

or some counterproposal came to nothing. Time

after time such discussion would begin on a fairly
high -- and appropriate -- level of general principles
and within moments degenerate into a competitive

and barely dignified clamor over this or that little
categorical program. ,

Had we thought categorical aid had distorted
the relations of the higher education community to
the federal government before the program was
announced, in the aftermath we were utterly con-
vinced. Corrupted would not be too strong a tern.
No one seemed able to think of the whole subject.
Few, even, seemed able to think of the interests of

a single whole institution. A major presidential
initiative that, right or wrong, was at very least
the product of some thought and some analysis
was greeted by silence on the part of precisely
those institutions that are presumably devoted to
thought and analysis.20/

Two years later, in her keynote address to the American
Council on Education, Martha E. Peterson, the distinguished
President of Barnard College, recalling my hectoring, acknow-
ledged that:

--.-we feared we might be enticed to take sides in
a partisan political battle.21/

But such rectitude had its cost. In a 1972 article, "The

Election, Politics and Higher Education," Professor John C.
Page 21

Honey of Syracuse University wrote that the Education Amendments
of 1972 were of the nature of definitive, closing-out legislation.
He added:

The failure of the Washington-based spokesmen for

higher education to contribute significantly to the

shaping of those amendments verges on the scan-

dalous.22.

The failure can be ascribed to all manner of reasons, not
least to the intense distaste of the leaders of the elite insti-
tutions at the time for President Nixon, but then higher educa-
tion had not much influenced any of the previous enactments;
why should it have done differently in 1972?

Nor, it should be noted, did members of Congress who
actually shaped the legislation receive the help from the
universities that they thought they needed. Policy analysis
seemingly gave way before what was perceived then on Capitol
Hill as a sort of greed-by-consensus approach. In July 1975,
the Higher Education Daily quoted Congressman John Brademas:

We turned to the citadels of reason. We said "Tell

us what you need," and they answered "We need $150

per student because that's what we've been able to

agree on."23/

As the Seventies moved on, the perception began slowly to
form in university circles that perhaps things had not gone
well. Complaints about relations with the federal government
began to be more frequently heard, .and they were not confined
to the routine laments that research grants were being cut back.
(fhe more a sector is dependent on federal support the more

routinized are its claims that such support is being reduced,

or is being threatened with reduction.)
Page 22

In 1974, the editors of Daedalus, the journal of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, made the unusual decision
to devote a double volume of the magazine to “American Higher
Education: Toward an Uncertain Future." Asked to contribute
an article on "The Politics of Higher Education," I began with
the theme. of passivity, or, rather, the absence of organized
action on behalf of reasonably coherent group interests:

The federal government is much involved with higher
education, but higher education is but little involved
with the federal government.

That the former should be so is understandable.
Higher Education is a necessary aspect of national
life, and the national government has always been
involved. Washington raised the subject in his
Inaugural Address. It is the imbalance of the
relation that is anomalous. Why has there been so
little initiative and effective organization on the
part of higher education in pressing its interests
with the national government? A review of the ex-
perience from the 1950s on suggests that government
has behaved about as governments will do, pursuing
recognizable interests, including that of acting
and appearing to act in terms of fairly generausly
defined public interests. Higher education might
have been expected to respond hy becoming a moder-
ately importunate and reasonably coherent claimant
on national resources. During this same period -—-
and given no better opportunity -- elementary and
secondary schools, and school-teachers, fashioned
themselves into an aggressive national lobby.
Higher education did not. In a manner recorded more
in literature than in politics, it responded ina
Passive mode, accepting support it had not the
power to command; agreeing without overmuch fuss
to the small conditions and obligations that seemed
ever to accompany such support. Dignity was
maintained; dependency deepened. The series of
histoxical accidents, which over the past two
decades have given a political priority to the
needs of higher education quite independent of any
assertion of those needs by higher education, evidently
induced an assumption that people, or rather The
People, would always be kind. When, as of late,
things have not quite worked as some would wish,
Page 23

there has been a tendency to attribute this to an

aberrant condition in government which will soon

enough be righted. This might be termed "Waiting

for 76."24/

Well, of course, 1976 came and nothing changed. As best I
can judge, nothing now will change for a long time. The objec-
tives of the state had been achieved: the bargaining power of
the universities had accordingly quite dissipated. If there
were university presidents who discovered this to their con-
sternation and annoyance about two years into the Carter admin-
istration, one can only recommend that they familiarize them-
selves with the work of James Q. Wilson or other students of
government now at large. The subject of education has been
disposed of. Environmentalism displaced it in the early
Seventies, and even that issve seems now to be waning. Energy
issues are coming to the fore.

Higher education is scarcely addressed in the party plat-
forms of 1980. The Republicans undertake to:

4

',..hold the federal bureaucracy accountable for its

harassment of colleges and universities and will

clear away the tangle of regulation that has un-

conscionabty~ driven up their expenses and

tuitions.... [and to] respect the rights of state

and local authorities in the management of their
school systems.25/

The Democrats propose to:*

---reaffirm the federal responsibility for stable
support of knowledge production and development
of highly trained personnel in all areas of
fundamental scientific and intellectual know-
ledge to meet social needs.26/

 

* (A painful duty requires that i acknowledge having been a
member this year, as in 1976, of the drafting committee for
the Democratic Platform.)
Page 24

The Republican Platform may be dismissed. No one is able
to "hold" the federal bureaucracy "accountable" for anything.
Once you put a bureaucracy in place it will behave like a
bureaucracy. If you wish to describe the behavior as "harrass-
ment," by all means do so. The bureaucracy doesn't mind. But
neither should one suppose that the bureaucracy will in any
significant way be made to behave differently.

It is to the Democrats one must turn for truth. The Party
Platform reaffirms the pledge "for stable Support of knowledge
production." This is a binding commitment; not perhaps as
important as a commitment to stabilize hog belly prices, or
to increase the production of synthetic fuels. But we have kept
the farm program going for on to fifty years now and we will
keep the knowledge production program going for at least as
long. Democrats are unexcelled at program preservation.
Republicans cannot make that claim.

In a word, support for higher education has become a
routine function of the national government. There is an agri-
culture program; a housing program; a higher-education program.
Each goes on and each retains roughly its share of the budget,
whilst growing steadily more detailed, a process which in the
welfare program has been given the name "tireless tinkering."

The higher education reauthorization bill of 1980 extends.
all the existing programs, with a quite large number of small
changes, but there are no significant changes in policy, or in

fundamental definition of the federal role. Grants to needy
Page 25

students are increased. Loan programs are rearranged. Parents,
as well as students, will henceforth be able to borrow. The

3 percent interest rate of the 1958 loan program is increased to
4 percent. Where there had once been a single program to aid
"developing institutions,” there will now be three. Additional
funds will be made available to train teachers of the handi- -
capped. Myriad other changes are made. But nothing of conse-
quence will be different.

_ Incrementalism in policy terms is associated with great
legislative complexity, followed by even greater administrative
complexity. The pioneering National Defense Education Act was
25 pages long. The routine Higher Education Amendments Act of

1980 was 148 pages long.

I noted in Daedalus in 1975 that in contrast with higher
education the elementary and secondary school teachers had
"fashioned themselves into an aggressive national lobby ."27/
in 1976 the National Education Association endorsed the
Democratic candidate for President, in return for a pledge to
establish a Department of Education. This was done in 1979.
(The American Federation of Teachers opposed the creation of
a department but as much, one felt, from the demands of inter-
union rivalry as from any objection in principle.) What role
had higher education in this momentous decision? As near as
possible to none. Many of the principal organizations repre-

senting colleges and universities in Washington professed
Page 26

neutrality. Others were opposed to the creation of such a depart-
Ment because they felt it would be dominated by elementary and
secondary interests. But any such latent opposition was
effectively squelched by the Carter administration, which was
nothing if not direct in making the interests of the state clear
to leaders of the universities, and making clear also that the
interests of the state came first. |

Thus, on February 1, 1979, the executive committee of the
Association of American Universities was summoned to the White
House. The presidents of seven major universities, including
Purdue, Iowa, Stanford, and Indiana, were greeted by six senior
administration officials: Vice-President Mondale, presidential
science advisor Frank Press, presidential domestic policy advisor
Stuart Eizenstat, education aide Elizabeth Abramowitz, Commis-_
Sioner of Education Ernest Boyer, and Assistant Secretary of HEW
Mary Berry. They were told in the most explicit terms that the
President was committed to the department and they were not to
oppose it if they did not want their own programs diminished.
They did not oppose.

I give the specifics of this meeting only to suggest the
reality of federal influence, and the normal nature of its
exercise. In fairness it should be noted that while the White
House successfully put down the opposition of the various Washing-
ton associations, some individual university presidents did speak

out against the proposed department. What is remarkable is that
Page 27

one must think them courageous for having done so.28/ But,
of course, to no avail.

This was not the first such episode of intimidation by the
White House. In 1971 President Nixon, angered by the opposition,
as he saw it, of the President of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology to his defense programs issued a directive "to
cut back on MIT's subsidy...." Nothing came of this, but as I
Observed in Daedalus,

The Nixon Administration's action is nonetheless

shocking and seemingly unrepented to this day....

[It) will serve to record yet again the funda-

mentally political nature of the federal relation _
to higher education and the difficulty of response.292/

ee!

The relationship continues to be fundamentally political.
Hence, "Waiting for '76" turned out to be very like Waiting for
Godot. Not much happens and nothing changes. This seems to
have come as a surprise to some. The shift of parties in the
White House appears to have brought more, not less, regulatory
intrusion in university affairs. But all the Carter Administra-
tion did was to establish a new department which will make |
regulation yet more extensive. This was not the intent of the
planners of the new department. It will be the result. That
at least is what a political scientist will forecast.

What of the future?

I have offered the thesis that the fundamental transition
in the relations of the University to the State took place
between 1957 and 1972. The result has been a great increase in

Federal aid to universities but with accompanying increases in
Page 28

Federal influence. Federal influence has gone from encouraging
the development of curricula, which was the main theme of N.D.E.A.,
to much more pervasive setting of standards as to student enroll-
ment and faculty selection. There is a rule of sorts that or-
ganizations in conflict become like one another. In just this
manner universities, once decentralized and collegial, more and
more come to adopt the hierarchical, bureaucratic form of the
federal government with which they deal. The structure of university
governance is increasingly shaped to match the federal

Opposite: a proliferation of vice-presidents, assistant deans,

and deputy chancellors to deal with deputy directors, assistant

secretaries, and deputy assistant secretaries. (In the new

Department of Education one finds officials with the title
Assistant Deputy Assistant Secretary.) Subtly, the leadership
of universities seems to be turning toward men and women whose
skills are in the kinds of adversary proceedings the federal
government brings about.

in a letter to The New York Times following the sentencing
of Professor Dinnan, Donald Cc. Freeman, professor of English
at Temple University, warned that he had been caught up in
Similar lawsuits and had not been provided counsel by the
universities involved. He wrote:

The lesson is clear. Professors who take part in

the personnel process of their own or other universities

are on their own in the courts, notwithstanding the long

traditions of confidential external referees and peer

review and gyaiuation of one's colleagues in academic
preferment. 30
Page 29

One may doubt this. Universities will begin providing legal
counsel for professors taken to court in these matters. But
increasingly such matters will be regarded as part of "the
personnel process" -- and professors will be regarded as
employees. For that is the way the federal government -- or any
normal hierarchical organization -- would approach the matter.
And in the transformed relationship, the norms of the State will
prevail over the norms of the University. But universities will
have to adapt. And if in doing so they lose much that is dis-
tinctive in their previous form and function: well, that is
progress.

The federal government has acquired the power to shut down
any university it chooses. The more important the university,
the greater the power. And the greater the concentration of
federal power in one place, the greater the danger. It was
that danger that moved David Riesman to oppose the Department
of Education, on the grounds that:

education is... vulnerable to attack because

something done in one of the three thousand accredited

postsecondary institutions by somebody may offend

somebody or get in the papers. It therefore needs to

have many diverse sources of support, combined with a

certain precious obscurity....Education is best served

by decentralization, not only in this huge and diverse

country but also within the federal government and its

many agencies.2+

There was a time when the universities could have insisted

on more equal terms. They did not. They did not and now cannot.

Sometimes, outside interests capture a federal bureaucracy.
Page 30

Not infrequently, however, the opposite occurs. May it simply
be noted that 37.8 percent of the budget of the American Council
on Education in 1979 came from federal funds.

It is in the nature of universities to require patrons, of
patrons to require certain forms of obeisance in return. A
friend, now the master of a Cambridge college, although a man
of assertive agnostic inclination, nonetheless faithfully once
each year prays for the soul of Lady Margaret Beaufort, a
sixteenth-century benefactress. Delayed gratification, however,
is not natural to twentieth-century politics, and universities
must now expect a long, for practical purposes permanent, regime
of pressure from the federal government to pursue this or that
national purpose, purposes often at variance with the interests
or inclinations of the unviersity.

There is nothing to be done about this, save to be aware of
it. I do genuinely believe that better terms could have been
got during the period of transition. They were not.

This is partly a failure of leadership. Few voices were
raised on behalf of the independence of universities. Indeed,
most of the political energies that led to greater university
regulation began in the universities themselves--in that "age
of rubbish" to use Richard Hofstadter's term. The fact is that
the universities politicized themselves before they were sub-
jected to any considerable external political pressure. That,
at all events, is the conclusion of one participant—observer,

as the sociologists say. Surely the views presented here
Page 31

cannot be complete: possibly they are quite wrong. The joy of
the university and the guarantor of its continued vitality is
that we can look forward to intensive studies in which we will
undertake to learn from our own experience. Having offered
this first set of propositions I can only tell you that I have
no illusions as to the degree of distress with which I shall be
required to read the dissenting views of those young scholars
just now appearing on the scene with, as Beerbohm put it,

32/
"months of activity before them."

(c) Daniel Patrick Moynihan
NOTES

l/ Executive Order 11246, September 16, 1965, Part II, Subpart
B(5).

2/ U.S. Department of Labor "In the Matter of U.S. Department of
Labor Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, Compliant,
and University of California, Berkeley, Respondent: Decision and
Administrative Order of the Secretary of Labor." Case No. F8-
OFCCP-7 (Washington, D.C.: unpublished report, n.d.), p. 77.

3/ Cirgular A-21, "Cost Principles for Educational Institutions "quoted
in John Walsh, "Universities Face New Accounting Rules,”
Science, October 3, 1980 p. 34.

4/ John Walsh, "Universities Face New Accounting Rules," Science,
October 3, 1980 p. 34. '

5/ "U.S. Regulations on Research," The New York Times, October 19,

1980, President Giamatti's comments were added after this lecture
was delivered.

 

6/ Memorandum to all equal employment opportunity coordinators,
by Daniel R. Cavan, Coordinator, Judiciary Equal Employment Progran,
Administrative Office of the United States Courts, Washington, D.C.
20544. Sept. 26, 1980.

7/ Derek Bok, "The Federal Government and the University," The
Public Interest, Winter 1980, p. 81-82.

8/ William J. McGill, “Government Regulation and Academic
Freedom" in The University and the State, Sidney Hook et.al., eds.
(New York: Prometheus Books, 1978), p. 140.

9/ McGill, p. 141. s
10/ Public Law 85-864, Title X, Section 1001(f).

ll/ Daniel P. Moynihan, "A Second Look At the School Panic."
The Reporter, June ll, 1959, p. 15-16.

12/ Lauriston R. King, The Washington Lobbyists for Higher Educa-
tion (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1975), p. l.

13/ Norman C. Thomas, Education in National Politics (New York:
David McKay Co., Inc., 1975), p. 24.

14/ Public Law 89-329, Title IV, Part A, Section 401l(a).

15/ Lawrence Gladieux and Thomas Wolanin, Congress and the
Colleges (Lexington, Massachusetts: Lexington Books, 1976), p. 12.

16/ Keith Spalding, "The Relevance of Federal Programs to the
Purpose of the Institution," Educational Record, Spring 1966,
p. 144-146. ,
ee

1 :
i7/ Moynihan, "A Second Look," p. 19. ot

i8/ Text of Richard Nixon's March 19, 1970 Message to Congress
on Higher Education; 1970 Congressional Quarterly Almanac
(Washington D. C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1971), p. 39-a.

19/ Nixon Message, p. 39-A,

20/ Daniel P. Moynihan, "On Universal Higher Education," in
Education for Everybody?, W. Todd Furniss, ed. (Washington, D.C.:
American Council on Education, 1971), p. 252-253.

21/ Martha E. Peterson, "Women, Autonomy and Accountability in
Higher Education" in Women in Higher Education, W. Todd Furniss,
ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1974), p. 6.

22/ John C. Honey, "The Election, Politics, and Higher Education,"
Science, December 22, 1972, p. 1243.

23/ John Brademas quoted in July 11, 1975 Higher Education Daily,
- 2, quoted in Gladieux and Wolanin, p. 242.

O

24/ Daniel P. Moynihan, "The Politics of Higher Education,"
Daedalus, Winter 1975, p. 128.

25/ 1980 Republican Platforn, p. 15.

26/ 1980 Democratic Platform, p. 38.

5

bo
™

Moynihan, "The Politics," p. 128.

28/ See for example statements submitted by Daniel P. Moynihan
in the Congressional Record, April 16, 1979. p. 54765.

29/ Moynihan, "The Politics," p- 142.

30/ Donald C. Freeman, “Letter to the Editor," The New York
Times, September 23, 1980.

31i/ David Riesman, see statement submitted by Daniel P. Moynihan
in Congressional Record, April 16, 1979, Pp- S4764.

 

32/ Max Beerbohn, "Diminuendo" in The Works of Max Beerbohm
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1896), p. 164