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Zoom enables quite a bit of multitasking. On the second day of the Middle States virtual conference, I had to step out (there’s probably a better term for it) for a while to participate in a statewide Zoom conference for a New Jersey workforce program. In the before times, such a thing would not have been possible.
I was able to drop in to an interactive session on governance issues at colleges. The breakout room had about 18 people in it from a variety of institution types, though I noticed that the community college folks were generally the most vocal. The facilitator seemed initially to construe “governance” as being almost entirely about boards. Boards are a crucial element of it, of course, but so are the various quasi-political bodies (senates, forums, etc.) on campus. Despite some differences across state lines, it quickly became clear that many of us are dealing with the same issues. I found that encouraging.
A midday panel followed featuring several folks from SUNY talking about diversity, equity and inclusion measures they’ve adopted. (The captioning software spelled SUNY as “Sunni,” which is not the same thing.) Rodmon King, the SUNY system DEI officer, presented along with Presidents Marion Terenzio from Cobleskill and my erstwhile Aspen colleague Michael Baston from Rockland.
The discussion was rich and wide-ranging, but a few elements jumped out at me. According to King, SUNY has a program that offsets the salaries of new faculty from underrepresented groups. As someone who manages an instructional budget, I can attest that a program like that could be powerful. Later, Baston mentioned that to be effective, we have to take “steps beyond statements,” specifically involving “resources [that] have to be reassigned.” That’s obviously easier to do when the resources in question are new, but the point stands. The easiest way to see if a college puts its money where its mouth is is to follow the money. If the budget doesn’t back up the statements, the statements will ring hollow.
Terenzio spoke to the delicate challenges involved in doing equity work in rural areas. Her college has established an “inclusive champions” model in which businesses and community groups that work with the college on inclusiveness training receive a medallion they can display to let prospective customers and/or employees know that everybody is welcome there. She went on to explain the “ecosystem” approach her college takes to inclusion, reaching all the way to local kindergartens. She repeatedly mentioned the need for equity work to be congruent with the local culture of an institution, no two of which are exactly alike. There’s wisdom in that.
Still, the policy nerd in me got the biggest kick out of Terry Hartle’s talk on current higher ed issues in the federal government. Hartle is the chief government relations person for the American Council on Education and has been for decades; he’s fluent in this stuff.
He won my “pun of the day” award for saying that a few months ago, the policy folks assumed that this year would be the “running of the bills at Pamplona.” Instead, nearly everything stalled. (I actually lost count of the number of times he used the phrase “kick the can down the road.”)
He noted that unless something significant changes, student loan borrowers will have to start making payments again on Feb. 1. Twenty-one million people, according to Hartle, have taken advantage of payment suspensions. That’s enough to constitute a major economic hit when payments resume. He suggested—I think correctly—that there’s nowhere near the support in Congress to support wholesale loan forgiveness, and that President Biden is unwilling to use executive authority to that end.
Loan forgiveness is economically rational but politically dicey. It flies in the face of our political culture. I still maintain that if the pitch had been to cancel the interest on loans, rather than the entire balances, that it might have worked; it would have allowed supporters to honor the widely held principle of individual responsibility—pay back everything you borrowed, but no more than that—while still offering real relief to millions of people. It would also address the issue of future students. If we forgive every outstanding loan but we don’t get costs down, then the balances will just start up again next year. But if we wipe out the interest on loans—both existing and prospective—then we don’t face the issue of the tub refilling. Alas, it was not to be, at least this year. Hope springs eternal.
As Michelle Asha Cooper had the day before, Hartle noted that the increase in the Pell Grant included in Build Back Better is intended as a “down payment” on its eventual doubling. Unlike “free community college,” Pell doesn’t rely on the states. Hartle didn’t connect these dots, but states aren’t usually free to deficit spend; any new programs require new revenue. But the feds can borrow to spend, so they have options that the states don’t. (Stephanie Kelton’s must-read book The Deficit Myth notes that the key distinction is that the feds issue their own currency and borrow in it, and the states don’t.) Programs that rely on state matches are asking a lot.
Given the realities of Congress, Hartle predicted that we’d see much less of a focus on higher ed legislation and more attempts to get things done through the executive branch. That’s probably correct. It’s not great, for any number of reasons, but it’s a predictable consequence of the level of obstruction we have now, and probably will have for a while.
There’s much more: “negotiated rule making” (“neg reg”) on gainful employment, new rules on Title IX, and the ever-present yet ever-absent possibility of actual reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, among other things. The policy nerd in me had a blast.
Still, two conferences in one day seems like enough.
