His administration proposed numerous cutbacks in federal aid, and stood watch over the beginning of the culture wars
Colloquy: Join an online discussion about Ronald Reagan’s higher-education legacy and how the late president will be remembered in academe.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, who was buried last week, had an often-adversarial relationship with higher education, both as president and as governor of California.
To achieve one of his major goals as president -- the reduction of federal spending -- Mr. Reagan proposed numerous cutbacks in funds for colleges, although most of his proposals were rejected by Congress, and he abandoned the effort late in his presidency.
The Reagan era also saw the publication of a major federal report that criticized the state of American education; the first significant efforts to crack down on abuses in student-aid programs, especially at for-profit colleges; conflicts between government secrecy during the cold war and the free exchange of scientific ideas; a foreign invasion conducted in part to rescue American medical students; and the beginning of the culture wars that would roil many college campuses for years to come.
“Reagan saw his role as a preacher, but not necessarily as a policy leader or implementer,” says Dick M. Carpenter II, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, who has studied Mr. Reagan’s impact on education. “Reagan was not as disastrous or as significant as people think he was.”
Mr. Carpenter does credit Mr. Reagan with prompting governors to play a more active role in education. “He believed in pushing education issues back down to the states.”
As governor of California, Mr. Reagan played a very active role, battling both student radicals and the state’s higher-education establishment.
During his gubernatorial campaign in 1966, Mr. Reagan criticized the University of California’s handling of student protests of the Vietnam War. Upon taking office, he cut the university’s budget by 10 percent. Three weeks later, the university’s Board of Regents voted to remove the system’s president, Clark Kerr, who had refused to crack down on the protests at Berkeley.
When one meeting of the regents was disrupted by protesters, the governor, an exofficio regent, was overheard telling his fellow members of the board: “The regents must take over this university. Our asses are to the wall.”
He later posted National Guard troops on the Berkeley campus after a demonstration in which one person died in clashes with police officers.
Abolishing a Department
During Mr. Reagan’s campaign for president in 1980, he advocated the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education, which had just been created during the Carter administration.
Once elected, however, he said he would not move immediately on the issue. Though he did try in later budgets to phase out the department, Congress always rejected the idea.
“It was generally understood that it was not a serious proposal,” said Edward M. Elmendorf, who served as assistant secretary for postsecondary education from 1983 to 1985, and is now senior vice president for governmental relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
But Mr. Reagan did succeed in reshaping how the federal government thought about higher education.
“The whole policy discussion about higher education that had been so active in the ‘70s really seemed to end with the budget approach that Reagan took,” says David W. Breneman, dean of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.
“Suddenly I had this sinking feeling that empirical policy analysis was going to become passé, that ideology was in the saddle. The attack on higher education wasn’t so much on educational policy per se as it was on price, inefficiency, and on arrogance.”
Chester E. Finn Jr., who was assistant secretary of education for research and improvement during Mr. Reagan’s second term, says the president’s “heads-up style” enabled the administration to confront problems in existing education programs.
“He energized ... people who actually had ideas, to actually do something about them,” Mr. Finn says. “It was a tone set at the top. The Education Department was a pretty happy ship, with a sense of team camaraderie, and of a team pulling together.”
Mr. Reagan’s first secretary of education, Terrel H. Bell, a former Utah commissioner of higher education, appointed the National Commission on Excellence in Education, which produced a 1983 report called “A Nation at Risk.” The report warned that public schools were “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.” That led many colleges and universities to develop programs to try to help the schools and to improve the quality of teacher education.
Mr. Bell later became disaffected with the administration’s attempts to cut the federal education budget, and he was the first cabinet member to quit after Mr. Reagan was re-elected in 1984.
Attacks on Student Aid
President Reagan’s second secretary of education, William J. Bennett, was one of the most colorful and outspoken figures in the administration. To help speed Mr. Bennett’s confirmation, Mr. Reagan assured Congress that he had “no intention of recommending abolition” of the Department of Education “at this time.”
Mr. Bennett, who served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities before becoming secretary, was a frequent critic of colleges and universities and was the chief executive’s “ideological soulmate,” says Mr. Carpenter, of Colorado. In 1984, while still chairman of the humanities endowment, he said too many graduate programs in the humanities were “insignificant, lifeless, and pointless.”
Mr. Bennett also lambasted student-aid programs. In his first news conference as secretary of education, he endorsed President Reagan’s plans to cut federal spending on them and suggested that some students might have to consider “divestitures of certain sorts -- like a stereo divestiture, an automobile divestiture, or a three-weeks-at-the-beach divestiture.”
His comments drew fire from students, higher-education groups, and the chairman of the Senate Education Committee, Robert T. Stafford, the Vermont Republican for whom Stafford Loans were later named. During Mr. Reagan’s two terms, the share of federal student aid in the form of grants, which do not need to be paid back, fell to 31.8 percent, from 55.3 percent in 1979-80.
The Reagan administration battled abuses in student-aid programs, establishing rules that cut off aid to colleges and trade schools at which more than 20 percent of students had failed to repay their loans. In 1981 Mr. Reagan signed into law tougher eligibility requirements for student loans and a requirement that students pay banks a 5-percent origination fee on them.
That same year, Mr. Reagan issued an executive order that directed federal agencies to develop plans to increase the participation of black colleges in government programs. But as grants gave way to loans, leaders of many black colleges saw a sharp increase in the number of students who had to borrow money to afford college.
In an interview with The Chronicle in 1988, Robert L. Albright, then-president of Johnson C. Smith University, a historically black college in Charlotte, N.C., said, “We’ve been asked to do a lot more, but haven’t been given the resources to do it.”
In his first seven years, Mr. Reagan had sought to reduce spending on student aid and other education programs. His “new federalism” proposals were an attempt to shift financial responsibility for social programs -- including $3.3-billion for education -- to the states.
Congress rejected most of Mr. Reagan’s proposed budget cuts, however. In 1988, at Mr. Bennett’s urging and under pressure from lawmakers, the president shifted course, sending Congress a budget proposal that would increase spending on both student aid and basic research.
Cold War Politics
Higher education played bit parts in Mr. Reagan’s ardent fight against communism. In a 1982 speech at his alma mater, Eureka College, in Illinois, he announced that the United States would pursue with the Soviet Union a strategic-arms reduction treaty, to reduce the number of nuclear weapons each superpower had.
The next year, concerns about 800 American students at the St. George’s School of Medicine in Grenada were a factor in his decision to invade that Caribbean country when leftist guerrillas took over the tiny island’s government. The students were evacuated by U.S. troops.
Cold-war tensions often brought the Reagan administration into conflict with scientists who sought a free exchange of information and ideas with their counterparts overseas. In 1985, in response to government concerns about the possible export of military technology to the Soviet Union and other nations, American scientific and engineering associations began to limit attendance at their meetings to U.S. citizens.
Scientists also clashed with the administration over Mr. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars. In 1985 thousands of American and Canadian scientists signed statements opposing the plan, which they said would not work and would divert funds from more important scientific research.
But Mr. Reagan won the approval of many scientists in 1987 when he decided to back the construction of a $4.4-billion particle accelerator known as the Superconducting Supercollider. The project was terminated in 1993, however, because of escalating costs and management problems.
After Mr. Reagan developed Alzheimer’s disease, in the 1990s, his wife, Nancy, became an advocate for research into that disease and, more recently, for research involving embryonic stem cells, which the current Bush administration has tried to limit.
“Mrs. Reagan’s support shows that you can be a good, conservative Republican and still support stem-cell research,” says Sean Tipton, vice president for communications at the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, a nonprofit organization that endorses stem-cell research.
Criticism on Civil Rights
Mr. Reagan was frequently criticized for weakening affirmative action and civil-rights enforcement. In 1988 civil-rights groups objected when the Education Department declared that four states, which were under court order to desegregate their public colleges, were in compliance with federal civil-rights laws.
The Reagan administration also essentially halted the enforcement at all colleges of key federal civil-rights laws, including Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which forbids sex discrimination at institutions receiving federal funds. When Grove City College v. Bell came before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, the Justice Department sided with the college, which claimed that it was not bound by those laws. The court ruled that only programs that directly received federal funds were subject to the laws.
In 1988 Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act over Mr. Reagan’s veto. The act made clear that civil-rights laws apply to all aspects of a college’s operation, regardless of whether a particular program received federal funds directly.
The Reagan Administration was also the first to “begin opposing racial and ethnic preferences in a systematic way,” says Roger B. Clegg, general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, one of the leading opponents of such preferences. Mr. Reagan’s policies and appointment of conservative judges to federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, “changed the terms of the debate” on affirmative action, he says, and reshaped the landscape in which later presidents had to deal with the issue.
But last June, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a conservative whom Mr. Reagan appointed in 1981, cast the swing vote in favor of affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger, a much-debated decision on admissions policies for law students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Justice O’Connor’s support of racial and ethnic preferences in certain circumstances may indicate that Mr. Reagan’s “legacy on affirmative action may not be as enduring as his administration had hoped it would be,” says William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens Commission for Civil Rights, which supports affirmative action.
As an actor, Mr. Reagan portrayed a college professor in the 1951 movie Bedtime for Bonzo and the Notre Dame football star, George Gipp, in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All-American. In the latter film, he uttered one of his most famous lines, “Win one for the Gipper,” and he became known as “the Gipper” in his political career.
In an interview with The Chronicle in 1988 that looked back on the Reagan administration, Leonard W. Wenc, then director of student financial services at Carleton College, said “the legacy of the Reagan years has been to spotlight the many educational issues that leave us both uncomfortable and frustrated. Unfortunately, the discourse was more often than not negative, bitter, and divisive -- an era of squandered opportunities.”
Michael Arnone, Eric Hoover, Jeffrey Selingo, and Welch Suggs contributed to this article.
http://chronicle.com Section: Government & Politics Volume 50, Issue 41, Page A24
