Washington
Former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, whose efforts to restructure federal student aid made college accessible for tens of millions of students from low-income families, died early Thursday morning after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 90.
No other federal lawmaker has opened the doors of college to as many financially needy students as Mr. Pell did. In 1972 the senator, a Rhode Island Democrat, took on the national higher-education associations and some powerful members of his own party when he championed legislation to create a new federal aid program that would provide grants directly to low-income students to help them gain access to college. The college groups had been fighting to get the government to continue providing aid dollars directly to colleges so that they could distribute the funds as they saw fit.
Mr. Pell persevered, and today the U.S. Education Department provides about $13-billion each year to more than five million low-income students.
While the creation of the largest federal grant program for students is considered to be Senator Pell’s crowning achievement, he also was the main sponsor of legislation to create the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The latter program is now the primary source of funds for humanities research in the United States. Both endowments were founded in 1965, and former Congressional aides say they reflected Mr. Pell’s belief that government could play a positive role in promoting the arts and humanities.
“Until Senator Pell came along, no one in Congress cared much about the country’s cultural well-being,” said Alexander D. Crary, who was an aide to Mr. Pell from 1978 to 1993, primarily on issues related to the endowments, until becoming a senior official at the NEA in the Clinton administration. “His incredible persistence and independent spirit—so typical of Rhode Islanders—paid off when the endowments were signed into law. It’s an extraordinary legacy.”
A Work Horse, Not a Show Horse
Born in New York City in 1918, Mr. Pell served six terms in the Senate, starting in 1961. He retired in 1997, barely a year after he disclosed that he had Parkinson’s disease.
Although he was a well-respected lawmaker, Mr. Pell was known for being eccentric. Former aides and colleagues say that the senator’s father, a portly man who served one term in the House of Representatives, profoundly influenced his son, to the extent that the rail-thin senator used to wear his father’s suits, no matter how ill-fitting. Mr. Pell especially liked his father’s belt, which he had to wrap twice around his waist to fit.
Mr. Pell was born into a family of great wealth, but he was no dilettante. “For all of his money and his affluent background, he was very much of a work horse, and not a show horse,” said Thomas R. Wolanin, a longtime Democratic aide in the House of Representatives. “He felt he had a duty to help make the world a better place, and to share his privilege with others.”
Legend has it that Mr. Pell came up with the idea for Pell Grants while on a ski slope in Switzerland. He wrote the idea on a paper place mat in the ski lodge, and when he got back to Washington, he handed it to his chief of staff and asked him to draft it into legislation.
Among his former aides, there is much debate about the details of that story. Some say that it was more likely that he conceived the idea on the slopes in Liechtenstein, while others question whether he skied at all.
But they all agree that he modeled his idea for Pell Grants on the GI Bill, which provided scholarships to members of the armed forces returning from World War II. Mr. Pell, who served in the Coast Guard during the war, took advantage of the GI Bill to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1946. According to Thomas G. Hughes, the senator’s chief of staff from 1976 until his retirement, Mr. Pell was most impressed by the role the GI Bill played in improving the lives of his constituents.
“Rhode Island was essentially a blue-collar state,” Mr. Hughes said. “Lots of returning veterans who returned there benefited from the aid.”
A ‘Titanic Battle’ to Create Pell Grants
Mr. Hughes called the 1972 fight over student aid “a titanic battle, one of the great legislative battles of the late 20th century.”
On one side was Mr. Pell, backed by some other prominent Democratic and Republican senators as well as the Nixon administration. He wanted to redesign the federal student-aid system so that it would help the most financially needy students go to the college of their choice. On the other side was Rep. Edith Green, the Oregon Democrat who headed the House subcommittee in charge of renewing the Higher Education Act. She believed that it should be left to colleges to decide who should receive federal aid dollars.
The leading higher-education associations, which had close ties to Ms. Green, lined up behind the congresswoman. The groups felt that Ms. Green’s plan would be more beneficial to their members. They also worried that the money needed to create a new student-aid entitlement program, as Mr. Pell proposed, would come out of the existing aid programs.
After each chamber passed its version of the legislation, a conference committee of House and Senate lawmakers met for two long months in the spring of 1972 to work out differences between the bills. Despite bipartisan support for Mr. Pell’s proposal, Ms. Green wouldn’t budge.
The logjam finally broke in the wee hours of the morning of May 17, when Rep. Carl D. Perkins, the Kentucky Democrat who was chairman of the House education committee, announced that he had brokered a deal with Mr. Pell. Under the agreement, Congress would create Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, but would put in place controls to ensure that the other federal aid programs would not be cut to finance it.
The college groups were floored. “This was not just a loss of face but a major political debacle,” Constance E. Cook, an associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, wrote in her book Lobbying for Higher Education: How Colleges and Universities Influence Federal Policy (Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).
Since then, however, the college groups have become strong supporters of Pell Grants, as the program was renamed in 1980, lobbying vigorously each year for increases in the maximum award. But Mr. Pell never quite forgave the denizens of One Dupont Circle, the headquarters of many of the national higher-education associations, for their opposition, often referring to them collectively as “the great fudge factory.”
With the government now spending about $13-billion each year on Pell Grants, college lobbyists, policy makers, and former Congressional aides agree that Mr. Pell was remarkably prescient in pushing to have federal financial aid follow the student.
The government never would have spent as much money on institutional aid, they say. In addition, had an institutional-aid program flourished, “it would have become a vehicle to control higher education,” said John F. Jennings, president of the nonprofit Center on Education Policy and a longtime aide to Representative Perkins. “Political leaders would have thought they could dictate the behavior of the institutions.”
Mr. Pell was “a visionary,” Mr. Jennings said. “In the long term, he knew his approach would be better for students and for postsecondary education as a whole.”
Stephen Burd was previously a senior writer at The Chronicle, and Sam Kean was formerly a Chronicle intern.
