Common Ground

Believe it or not, there is a trio of trends in higher education that both left- and right-wing critics of academe are alarmed by.

Speech Codes

When I debated Megan Fitzgerald of Free Exchange last spring, the abolition of campus speech codes was one of the few educational reforms that we both agreed on. Now comes Gary Pavela of the University of Maryland with an article in the December 1, 2006 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Only Speech Codes Should be Censored.”

“I often ask audience members at higher-education conferences how many of
them come from campuses with ‘hate speech’ codes,” Pavela writes. “A substantial minority raise their hands, confirming research that about a third of the nation’s
colleges and universities continue to promulgate student disciplinary rules prohibiting expression that ‘subordinates’ others or is ‘demeaning, offensive, or hateful.’”

“Such continued adherence to speech codes is by now predictable, but remains puzzling.”

Rich Kid, Poor Kid

The subversion of a policy designed to help students get their feet in the
doors of colleges that their income levels would usually only leave them looking at has
drawn the fire of both liberal and conservative groups. “Flagship universities often
justify the size of their tuition increases, at least in part, by the need to provide financial
aid to needy students,” Kati Haycock and Danette Gerald of the Education Trust
write. “Yet more and more they aren’t spending that money on the low-income students
for whom such aid is absolutely essential if they are to attend college, but on the high-income students who will help increase their rankings in college guides.”

The Education Trust is fairly left of center. They wrote those words in a report that explicitly endorses racial preferences.

But economist Richard Vedder and Hillsdale president Larry Arnn, no collectivists they, have noticed and been disturbed by the same trend. Where left and right part company is on the question of what to do to change the situation.

The policy analysts at think tanks such as the Education Trust would like more student aid directed entirely on the basis of need. Free market thinkers such as Vedder, meanwhile argue that pumping more money into colleges in this fashion only exacerbates the problem of third party payments that have already made higher education a trillion-dollar-industry with, at best, a vaguely defined product.

Third-party-payments are made by someone other than the consumer at the point of consumption of a good or service and have led inevitably to the third problem in academia today as identified by both liberals and conservatives.

The Student Loan Cartel

“Greater accountability is also needed in federally guaranteed student loans, which represent nearly one-third of all funding for college tuition in the United States,” former Accuracy in Academia director Leslie Carbone wrote recently in a column distributed by the Lexington Institute. “A September report of the Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General found that Financial Partners, the DOE division responsible for overseeing the Federal Family Education Loan Program, ‘had not implemented an acceptable level of internal control over its monitoring and oversight’ of the program and its guaranty agencies, servicers and lenders.”

“Earlier this year, Congress expanded student borrowers’ consumer freedom by eliminating what’s called the single-holder rule, which limits students’ choice of consolidation lenders for their student loans.” Both Vedder and Anya Kamenetz, the left-leaning author of the book Generation Debt, draw gasps from Washington audiences when they make references to the 80-billion-dollar student loan industry, usually from representatives of same.

To their everlasting credit, neither the charmingly irascible professor emeritus nor the delightfully irrepressible scribe is deterred by this reaction. Rather they are energized.

But again, they are at loggerheads on what to do about it. Surely there must be some mutually agreed upon middle-ground in which the government, for example, cuts its aid commitments in half and refashions them as challenge grants to universities, which must match the amounts from their already overflowing coffers as assistance based on both merit and need, tightly defined in the same students.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.