Morning has barely broken, and Sham Ninah is already behind schedule.
The New York University junior arrives at Washington Square Park at 7:35 a.m., five minutes too late to catch the university’s purple trolley.
| ALSO SEE: Lobbying Expenses of a Sampling of Colleges and Higher-Education Groups in 1996 |
Clad in a blue blazer and tie, he breaks into a sweat as he sprints for the subway, desperate to catch his 24 fellow students bound for Penn Station.
The N.Y.U. students, accompanied by administrators, are headed for Washington, where they will meet with Clinton Administration officials and Democratic and Republican lawmakers to seek more support for financial aid and other federal programs important to the students and to N.Y.U.
Universities spend more time and effort lobbying Congress than ever before. In 1996, N.Y.U. spent more than $550,000 on lobbying. It normally sends its professional lobbyists to see lawmakers. Today, a team of students is going.
“It’s much better for members of Congress to meet with our students, to see how real people have been affected by their actions,” says President L. Jay Oliva, who has joined the students for their tour.
Preparing to board the Amtrak Metroliner for Washington, the students applaud and shout “Sham, Sham, Sham!” as they spot Mr. Ninah running toward them.
Higher education is hot on Capitol Hill. More Americans cite education as their first concern than any other topic. Lawmakers of both parties know it’s a can’t-miss issue and scramble for a piece of it. President Clinton’s proposed tax breaks for college costs, and this year’s scheduled renewal of the law that governs most federal higher-education programs, insure that college issues will be unusually prominent in the business of Congress in 1997.
Much of that activity unfolds in public. Bills are introduced, hearings held, laws enacted. But a glimpse inside the process reveals a more complicated relationship between colleges and Congress.
On any given day, scores of lobbyists fan out on behalf of individual campuses or coalitions of them. They seek earmarked funds from Congress, press lawmakers to support their stances on legislation, or let staff members know what’s happening at the colleges. Academics vie to be among the experts who testify about Japanese politics, toxic chemicals, or the reasons for rising tuition. Professors on leaves of absence from academe work in Hill offices, trying to add depth and sophistication to lawmakers’ understanding of health care or campaign finance. A few run for Congress, and sometimes win.
This is a look at one such day last week.
In a conference room not far from several Congressional buildings, lobbyists for the University of Michigan lay out coffee, doughnuts, and bagels.
At least a dozen colleges now maintain full-time federal-relations offices in Washington. Nothing, say their lobbyists, beats being on the scene constantly. They are far more likely to bump into key contacts on elevators and on the street. They can keep close watch over the many federal agencies and Congressional committees.
They try to help everyone, from visiting students to Congressional staffers who are seeking advice from an expert in academe or looking for tickets to a big football game for their bosses. Some have called their admissions offices on the behalf of lawmakers, to ask about an applicant -- although they deny trying to sway admissions decisions.
They spend time building coalitions, a task they view as vital to their success. Today, presidents of the Big Ten universities plan to meet with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi, and Senator James M. Jeffords, a Vermont Republican and chairman of the panel that sets policy for many education and research programs. The presidents have been granted 30 minutes with each.
Thomas A. Butts, a lobbyist for Michigan, gathers federal-relations officials from seven other Big Ten colleges to plan the afternoon. J.T. Forbes, coordinator of federal relations for Indiana University, tells them that both of the Senators view the meetings “as a listening opportunity.”
“They don’t see this as a meeting to negotiate anything. They don’t want it to seem that way,” he says. The presidents should be prepared to answer questions on any higher-education issue, but their own comments should drive home the importance of spending federal money on university research and on preserving access to college, Mr. Forbes reminds them. Other than that, he says, they should be all ears and view the meetings as an opening for better relations down the road.
Nathaniel B. Thayer has five minutes to analyze Japanese politics since 1955 for a panel of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Fortunately, this professor of Japanese studies at the Johns Hopkins University is a seasoned pro at Congressional testimony. He has offered it more times than he can count in the past 20 years, and he knows which details to highlight for his audience of two Senators, and which to leave for the Congressional Record. “If I were a betting man, I think we’re in for another long stretch of L.D.P. politics,” he says of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has run Japan for much of the past 40 years.
Dr. Thayer is a regular at Hill hearings partly because of his past work as a Central Intelligence Agency officer in Asia. His stature is enhanced by his contacts in the Japanese and U.S. governments and by the popularity of his 1968 book, How the Conservatives Rule Japan. He is sometimes frustrated by a low turnout by lawmakers, but the chance to brief them and help shape policy keeps him coming back.
“I come when they ask me to,” he says.
Across Capitol Hill, George M. Gray is trying to avoid the mistake he made in his first stab at Congressional testimony two years ago, when a committee chairman yelled at him for exceeding the five-minute limit on opening statements. Today, before a panel of the House Committee on Small Business, Dr. Gray, deputy director of Harvard University’s Center for Risk Analysis, gets to the point. He argues that laws requiring small businesses to report their use of toxic chemicals are often misguided. Focus instead on the misuse of chemicals, he says. “Chemical use does not equal chemical risk.”
His views might enrage environmentalists, but none were on hand to offer another perspective. An aide to Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, a Maryland Republican who heads the panel, says Dr. Gray was chosen through a selection process that is “designed to cast as wide a net as possible.” Dr. Gray thinks he was picked because his risk-analysis center advertises its expertise to Congress. Democratic members did not suggest any witnesses.
At noon, as Dr. Gray steps into the sunshine to head back to the airport, he can hardly wait for his next hearing. “This is great,” he says.
Walter H. Capps is accustomed to freshmen, but not to being one. As a newly elected Democratic Congressmen in a seat held by Republicans for 50 years, he is clearly a bit intimidated but quietly thrilled with the move he has made after 32 years as a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Mr. Capps has joined the ranks of the 35 members of Congress with at least modest higher-education experience, experience that means much or little, depending on the member. His forthrightness and intellectual bearing recall Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but Mr. Capps is not sure that he will grow into the politician’s role that the Democratic Senator from New York mastered long ago. For now, his staff interprets the Hill’s “political equations,” and he handles the substance.
“I try to be analytical in all the -- I don’t want to say methodologically sophisticated ways, because that sounds like the way I used to talk, but that’s what I try to do,” Mr. Capps says.
He grew up in Nebraska but spent most of his professional life building Santa Barbara’s religion department. In 1987 he persuaded another Cornhusker, then-Governor Bob Kerrey, to collaborate on a course about the Vietnam War, in which Mr. Kerrey, now a Senator, had fought. The work bonded them, and the political bug bit Mr. Capps as he slogged through the New Hampshire snow campaigning for Mr. Kerrey’s 1992 presidential bid.
Thanks in part to a redrawn district, Mr. Capps is now a member of the House Science Committee and the International Relations Committee. He is not yet at ease with the rush of Capitol Hill, the clipped conversations, the shallowness of some debates. On his bookshelves, a black-and-white basketball signed by the Santa Barbara women’s team stands out; a videotape titled “The Congress” sits tucked away.
While Mr. Capps plans to encourage cities with both strong college and business communities to develop “Research Triangles” like North Carolina’s, and while he favors federal dollars for the humanities and science research, he has not cast himself as a standard-bearer for higher education. But his colleagues have his number.
“There was a well-known Democrat who was standing off the House floor one day as I was waiting in line to give one of those one-minute-speech things. When I got to him, he said, ‘Walter, I’ve got this book on the Sumerians, and I wonder what you think about it.’”
In the Cannon House Office Building, Daniel J. Palazzolo leans back in his chair, props both feet on his desk, and surveys his schedule.
“I’m juggling a half-dozen issues, but this should be a pretty uneventful day,” says Mr. Palazzolo, an associate professor of political science at the University of Richmond. He is on a year’s leave, working with Representative Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., a Maryland Republican, on a fellowship sponsored by the American Political Science Association.
But as he tucks his schedule back into his shirt pocket, his “catch-up” day is blown apart. Earlier that morning, on a radio talk show, he is told, Mr. Ehrlich’s predecessor, Helen D. Bentley, criticized a bill to reform U.S. patent law, which the Congressman supports. The bill would, among other things, put the federal Patent and Trademark Office in private hands, hurting independent inventors and small businesses and giving foreign inventors an edge over Americans, Ms. Bentley said.
Within 15 minutes of her comments, constituents concerned about the bill’s ramifications have jammed the phones and facsimile machines in Mr. Ehrlich’s offices on the Hill and back in his district.
Steven Kreseki, the Congressman’s legislative director, huddles with Mr. Palazzolo. “We’ve got to talk about this now, nail down some talking points for Bob.”
Mr. Palazzolo is the office’s point man for patent reform and some other issues. His specialty is the budget. His expertise on such a visible issue might have garnered him a more prestigious assignment with a seasoned lawmaker or a prominent committee, but he chose to work with Mr. Ehrlich, a second-term Congressman just assigned to the House Budget Committee, because he knew he would be needed.
The dozens of faculty fellows on Capitol Hill benefit from their experience, and the lawmakers profit, too. Having a fellow is a sign of prestige, says Mr. Kreseki. It also means having another staff member, at no cost. In Mr. Palazzolo’s case, the university pays half his salary, and the political-science association the other half.
His days are spent doing research on issues, writing position papers, attending hearings, and talking with constituents and lobbyists -- work he believes will enhance his teaching about the legislative process. “I’ll ask students to think a little differently about policy analysis,” he says. “I’ll talk more about staff, about money.”
Today, however, patent reform rules.
At 11:45, an inventor from Mr. Ehrlich’s district shows up, agitated about the patent bill. For half an hour, Mr. Palazzolo tries -- but fails -- to win him over.
Still, the professor respects the man’s grasp of the issues. Informed critics are the exception, he says. “The level of analysis, from other members, from lobbyists, and from constituents, is often superficial.
“As soon as somebody makes a policy statement, everybody and their brother faxes you their opinion, without having given the policy statement much thought. I’m thinking: ‘God, has anyone stopped to give this issue any real thought?’”
Congressman Capps is hustling through the labyrinth of House office buildings, looking for Mikhail Gorbachev. The former president of the former Soviet Union is winding up an early-afternoon Q&A with members of Congress about NATO expansion when Mr. Capps finds the right room, securing a front-row seat next to a Republican friend.
As escorts try to whisk Mr. Gorbachev off to the State Department, Mr. Capps rises. The President halts for a last question, and it’s the professor, not the politician, who asks it: What Western philosophers influenced you as you oversaw the end of your nation?
Maybe something is lost in translation, but Mr. Gorbachev expounds on an entirely different subject: A Communist for most of his life, he says his views changed as his nation changed. Only near the end of the Soviet Union, he says, did he realize that his party’s ideology was “a mistake.”
Not quite the answer Mr. Capps was looking for. Then again, his query probably wasn’t the kind that Mr. Gorbachev was expecting. Mr. Capps is eager to share his accumulated wisdom. Will that role make him a player on the Hill? He thinks so, but he’s wrestling with a life where there’s no time for three-hour lectures.
“I still think like an academic,” he says. “I don’t ask the political questions yet.”
As director of Congressional relations for higher education’s umbrella group, the American Council on Education, Becky H. Timmons is at the center of academe’s lobbying efforts. That’s no small operation: In addition to the representatives of individual colleges, it includes an army of lobbyists for associations.
Some college officials cling to the view that lobbying is a dirty word and that higher education should stay above the fray, or at least appear to -- a notion Ms. Timmons calls “quaint.”
She has spent most of her morning honing Congressional testimony that the group’s president, Stanley O. Ikenberry, will deliver in the next week, and soliciting feedback -- and possible endorsements -- about the remarks from other higher-education groups. She also sent Senator Moynihan’s staff some data to combat the argument that increasing student aid causes tuition to rise, for use in a hearing on the subject the next day.
Now she rushes to the Hill for meetings with aides on key committees. Ms. Timmons maintains that the higher-education lobby “prides itself on being bipartisan,” and her meetings suggest that she has friends on both sides of the aisle.
She oohs and aahs over pictures of the 2-year-old son of Amy P. Abraham, a Democratic aide on the Senate Budget Committee. She shares an enthusiastic hug with Sally Stroup, a Republican staff member on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. (Ms. Timmons’s office door is more partisan: On it are bumper stickers that say “Bush-Quayl: It’s a Mistake,” and “Newt-Free Zone” next to a symbol for hazardous waste. The Gingrich sticker was put up, she notes apologetically, by her colleague Sheldon E. Steinbach, a proud Republican.)
As she rushes from one appointment to the next, Ms. Timmons sneaks a cigarette and assesses each meeting. From Ms. Abraham, she gleaned useful nuggets about how student aid is faring in the latest budget negotiations. With Ms. Stroup, she says, she sought to “take the temperature” of hearings on the Higher Education Act that the education panel is holding across the country. The news is not good: Ms. Stroup tells her that all the lawmakers hear from parents is that “we can’t afford” college. “It confirmed my worst fears,” Ms. Timmons says.
The north lobby of the Capitol is bustling. Schoolchildren watch a heavy man in a Chicago Blackhawks jersey as he points a video camera at the ceiling. The Big Ten presidents and lobbyists file through a metal detector for their meeting with Mr. Lott.
At the Senator’s request, the meeting is closed to the press. He reportedly spends part of the time recalling his work in the University of Mississippi’s alumni and admissions offices. A member of the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, he also expresses concern about federal spending on fisheries research. More substantively, he reminds the presidents that many regions of the country vie for federal dollars, and that spending on research has to be spread around.
The meeting with Senator Jeffords also is closed -- this time, at the request of the Big Ten presidents. “They feel like they can have a more unfettered discussion” without reporters, says Mr. Forbes, the lobbyist for Indiana University. Much of the discussion is said to focus on the Senator’s worries about college costs.
As agreed on at the morning meeting, the federal-relations officers plan to send the Senators thank-you letters and to work together on any significant messages the letters are to contain. They also plan to thank Senator Daniel R. Coats, the Indiana Republican who helped arrange the meetings. He often goes to bat for Indiana University and is scheduled to deliver a commencement address there this year.
“Team N.Y.U.,” as the students and administrators have dubbed themselves, has left Capitol Hill and packs the second floor of an Italian restaurant.
It has been an exhausting day, and now, at 8 p.m., the students feel at home amid the piles of pizza and pitchers of soda that the university has bought for them.
During the day, they praised Clinton Administration officials for creating the AmeriCorps national-service program and for proposing big increases in student aid this year, and they got pats on their backs for their own efforts from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress.
To each lawmaker, they presented purple N.Y.U. T-shirts. From one, Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who attended the university as a graduate student, they got a gift in return: a $20 bill that he jokingly gave Dr. Oliva as a contribution to N.Y.U.'s Alumni Fund. “For the party tonight,” the president told the students, waving the bill.
At day’s end, the students question what they have accomplished. Will their messages stick, some wonder, or be flooded out by the demands of the other constituents who lobby lawmakers each day?
Jonathan Liss, a law student, is encouraged. “While their perspectives may be a bit different, both Democrats and Republicans seem to agree that something has to be done for education,” he says.
Others are dubious. “Talk is cheap,” says Jennifer Hill, a junior.
Most agree that they have done their part to increase support for student aid. “Every little bit counts,” says Robert Vaughan, a law student. “We do it today, another university will do it tomorrow.”
STEPHEN BURD, PATRICK HEALY, DOUGLAS LEDERMAN, STEPHEN MARTIN, PETER SCHMIDT, and PAULETTE WALKER contributed to this article.
LOBBYING EXPENSES OF A SAMPLING OF COLLEGES AND HIGHER-EDUCATION GROUPS IN 1996
| College or group | Reported lobbying expenses | Lobbyists |
| American Council on Education | $184,000 | Council officials and 3 firms |
| Association of American Medical Colleges | $600,100 | Association officials and 3 firms |
| Boston U. | $720,000 | Cassidy & Associates |
| California State U. System | $40,000 | University officials |
| Career College Association | $240,000 | Association officials |
| Harvard U. | $480,000 | Harvard’s D.C. office; Baker & Hostetler; O’Neill and Athy |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | $335,445 | M.I.T.'s D.C. office |
| Pennsylvania State U. | $80,000 | University officials |
| Student Loan Marketing Association | $3,092,500 | SallieMae and 5 firms |
| The College Fund/UNCF | $120,000 | Fund officials and Dean Blakey & Moskowitz |
| U. of California System | $1,300,000 | U. of California’s D.C. office |
| U. of Hawaii | $328,718 | University officials and Cassidy & Associates |
| U. of Massachusetts System | $370,000 | University officials and Campbell-Crane & Associates |
| U. of Massachusetts at Amherst | $272,188 | University officials |
| U. of Miami | $680,000 | University officials; Jorden Burt Berenson & Johnson; the Jefferson |
Note: Colleges and higher-education organizations reported these expenses to comply with the Lobbying Disclosure Act
SOURCE: CLERK OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
