Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
The flaws in the American election system are deep and widespread, extending beyond isolated voting issues in a few locations and flaring up in states rich and poor, according to a major new study from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
The group ranked all 50 states based on more than 15 criteria, including wait times, lost votes and problems with absentee and provisional ballots, and the order often confounds the conventional wisdom.
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A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor’s Gerken’s 2009 book, “The Democracy Index,” was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said.
“Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings,” Professor Gerken said. “But it also produces professional peer pressure.”
via U.S. Voting Flaws Are Widespread, Study Shows – NYTimes.com.
Back in 2009, we published The Democracy Index by Heather Gerken. The book proposed a ranking system for U.S. elections that would look at everything from the average time a voter has to wait in line, to whether the polling place is adequately staffed, to how accurately votes are counted. The idea was to identify states with practices that “work” and motivate states appearing toward the bottom of the list to improve their practices. The ranking system would be publicly available, similar to U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings, and empower rank and file voters to identify problems and demand their officials look into election practices.
Thanks to Pew, we now have an interactive site where we can explore just how well different states fared during the 2008 and 2010 elections and we can definitively say that while Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Minnesota have a lot to celebrate, Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia should probably re-evaluate their current voting systems.
This graphic shows the state by state turnout:
Only 49% of eligible voters in Hawaii cast their ballot compared 78.1% in Minnesota.
This graphic shows the average times voters waited in line:
Vermont voters waited an average of 2.5 minutes, while South Carolina voters clocked in an average of 61.5 minutes. Hope they brought a book to read while waiting on line. Speaking of which, for more background on the EPI, read The Democracy Index.
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The Democracy Index
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A great number of things have changed in American airlines since the attacks of September 11, 2001. Newer, “safer” procedures have been introduced, and seemingly outdated processes have been cast aside. What’s questionable, however, is if these new procedures really hold much of a benefit or any advantage at all. With the creation of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act on November 19, 2001, airlines no longer contracted with private companies for airport screening. The federal government has taken over airline precautions in the form of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The TSA has implemented a number of policies to make the airports and airlines safer places to go. A more watchful eye now oversees our airline’s customers.
Long gone are the days when passengers could enter the cockpit at free will. Flight decks now include bulletproof doors made with heavy duty materials, such as ballistic aluminum armor unified with composite armor laminates to prevent unauthorized access by terrorists or anyone wishing to do harm. While procedures like these seem to bear little negative repercussions in regard to travel safety, there are certainly some security actions on the social side of the spectrum that could be categorized as socially questionable. Tallying off the list of possible missteps in airline security policy prompts many experts in sociology, law, and philosophy to dissect the newer airline security model. Perhaps there should be some consideration given to the fact that certain regulations have “pushed the envelope” a little too far.
Take for example the case of Nick George, as reported by PBS NewsHour. George was passing through security in a Philadelphia airport on his way back to college in California. While going through the security checkpoint, George had been carrying some 200 flashcards written in Arabic. Around ten of the flashcards had ‘alarming’ vocabulary written on them, such as “bomb” or “terrorist.”
George was using these flash cards for his Arabic language course and had merely been trying to study more about the Arabic media. George’s offered explanation did not prevent him from being meticulously questioned by the FBI and TSA for hours on end. The vocabulary words were not in fact used for sadistic doctrine, as the airport security officials’ actions might have suggested. This raises the question as to whether or not George’s First and Fourth amendment rights were violated. A suit had been filed on behalf of The American Civil Liberties Union and has since been dropped by the federal defendants and is now “proceeding to discovery,” which means further investigation is underway.
So, are basic human rights being violated by some of the more radical regulations instituted by today’s airlines? Harvey Molotch, author of Against Security believes there is a case to be made. Molotch addresses some of the most controversial policies that have sparked heated debates across human rights and political forums across the nation. When it comes to de-humanizing individuals, Molotch believes the movement to ban public restrooms is at the paramount of humiliation and degradation aimed toward the human species. To deprive people of such a basic human function is frightening to anyone who values their freedoms and constitutional rights.
Read more about airport security and what we can do to make travel in our country safer without sacrificing our dignities and the right to live life peacefully:
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In When the State Speaks, What Should it Say?, Corey Brettschneider argues that groups that enjoy First Amendment rights to discriminate in their membership should still receive a critical response from government. On his view, the government has an obligation to express its own core message that all citizens — regardless of race, sexual orientation, or gender — are entitled to full participation in society. Among the specific proposals in the book, Brettschneider contends that government should express the principle that all people are free and equal by refusing to grant publicly funded tax exemptions to discriminatory groups, including the Boy Scouts of America. In an oped in today’s Providence Journal he makes this case:
Make Scouts’ bias bite
COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER
The Boy Scouts of America recently decided to continue its ban on gay Scouts, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) that the BSA has a free-association right to exclude gays.
Does that mean that the American public and its government must accept, even condone, discrimination and stand idly by? Certainly not. The right of free association is not the only element in play here.
One possible response to the BSA’s ban on gay Scouting respects the BSA’s First Amendment rights while strongly discouraging the BSA’s policy of discrimination. It is a response the Nixon administration used effectively. Namely, the Internal Revenue Service could revoke the BSA’s nonprofit status. The BSA could continue its discrimination, but the federal government would no longer subsidize the organization: Charitable contributions to the BSA would no longer be tax-deductible.
This way forward has constitutional roots in a case decided 30 years ago. At the time, Bob Jones University admitted African-American students but banned interracial dating and any advocacy of interracial marriage. Legislation bluntly prohibiting these policies might have led to a decision — similar to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dale — holding that Bob Jones University’s First Amendment rights had been violated.
Instead of pursuing a ban through legislation, the Nixon-era Internal Revenue Service applied federal law so that discriminatory groups would no longer receive the public subsidies associated with nonprofit status. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the IRS reading of the law and ruled that making nondiscrimination a condition for tax-exempt nonprofit status was compatible with Bob Jones’s constitutional rights.
It does not follow that the right to free association entitled discriminatory groups to enjoy public support in the form of tax-exemption. As then Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote in Bob Jones University v. United States, “Charitable exemptions are justified on the basis that the exempt entity confers a public benefit.” One condition for providing a public benefit should be respect for the equal rights of all citizens, gay and straight alike.
In defending its free-association right, the BSA has delivered a message that gays cannot live the “morally clean, straight” lives that are central to its purpose of preparing the future leaders of America. The alleged connection between the BSA’s message and its purpose is flawed. The message excludes some children from leadership training under the BSA.
But even if we grant that the BSA’s freedom to discriminate in its membership is protected under the First Amendment, there is still a critical role for the government to play. The government has an obligation to express its own core message that all citizens — people of all sexual orientations — are entitled to full participation in society. If the BSA seeks government protection under the First Amendment for its anti-gay membership policy, it should also be prepared for criticism of its discriminatory message.
The government should promote the principle that all citizens are free and equal by refusing to grant publicly funded tax exemptions to discriminatory groups, including the BSA. As I argue in my recent book, “When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? How Democracies Can Protect Expression and Promote Equality,” it is essential that the government not subsidize discriminatory groups, even if these same groups have rights against coercive sanctions.
States can also pass legislation to cut off subsidies for discriminatory groups. New Jersey, for instance, which originally sought to ban discrimination in private organizations such as the BSA, should now set stricter standards for nonprofit status and state tax deductibility.
Residents of all states should demand that tax exemptions and tax deductions for charitable gifts should not be available to support groups that discriminate and refuse to offer a public benefit to all citizens.
Corey Brettschneider is a professor of political science at Brown University.
The Comparative Urban Studies Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center in D.C. recently hosted author Daniel A. Bell for a great discussion around his recent book, The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, co-authored with Avner de-Shalit.
Bell was joined by John J. DeGioia, President of Georgetown University. This event was also co-sponsored by the Program on America and the Global Economy and the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. You can download the full audio podcast and PowerPoint presentation on the event page on the Woodrow Wilson Center site.
Do you have any questions for Daniel A. Bell or Avner de-Shalit about cities? Let us know in the comments section!
Where has liberalism gone wrong? Douglas Massey says it veered off course with a broad emphasis on symbolic politics—rather than what is needed: concrete reasons why it is in American’s economic as well as moral interest to support the liberal cause. According to Massey, what liberals have long suffered from is the lack of a consistent ideology. So back in 2005 when he published Return of the “L” Word, his call for a liberal realignment, he set forth a clear set of liberal principles to explain how markets work in society, and applied them to liberal policies. Recently I caught up with him to find out to what extent he thinks the Obama administration has offered the public the consistent liberal vision that was needed. Read on…
When I published Return of the L-Word in 2005, I argued that the time was ripe for a liberal realignment and that what was lacking was a clear explanation to voters of the key role played by government in producing a healthier, more equitable, and less divided society. I was impressed by what Obama accomplished in the 2008 campaign and thought someone in his campaign must have been channeling my book, or may even have read it!
The electoral campaign he put together in 2008 constructed exactly the coalition that Democrats need to build for the future, creating high turnouts among blacks, Latinos, Asians, young voters, and progressive whites. The three minority groups by themselves together comprise a third of the population, liberals make up another 20%, and persons aged 18-29 another 17%.
Despite some overlap between these various components, it is clear that a working majority of the electorate is easily achievable by firing the passions of minorities, liberal whites, and young people while drawing in as many independents as practical. More importantly, given current demographic trends, size of the ruling majority will only become ever larger over time. By 2050, minorities by themselves are projected to comprise 54% of the U.S. population. Older, conservative white people are a withering demographic.
Obama demonstrated the feasability of this political strategy by putting together a coalition that captured 53% of the popular vote, 28 states, and 68% of the electoral college. The obvious strategy upon assuming office was for him to play to the base that elected him by fulfilling campaign promises to reform wall street, enact immigration reform, spend to create jobs, end the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and generally move forward on a progressive agenda of fairness and redistribution.
Instead, to my growing amazement as President Obama did the opposite. Once in office he bent over backwards to appease older, conservative white voters—a segment of the population that would never support him under any circumstances—by cutting taxes, limiting the size of the stimulus, accelerating deportations, increasing border enforcement, inviting Goldman Sachs into his administration, escalating the war in Afghanistan, and continuing to support a highly racialized criminal justice system. Even on his signature achievement—health care reform—he caved into health insurance monopolists and big pharma before legislative negotiations had even begun.
It is all well and good to reach across the aisle and make a big show of bipartisanship. It was a nice gesture right after the inauguration; but once his hand was slapped away and the Republicans had proclaimed their policy of opposition at all costs, he should have doubled down on principle and fought tenaciously for the causes he believed in. The winning strategy was to send up proposal after proposal and have the Republicans shoot them down and then run on the moral vision behind the defeated proposals and against Republican obstructionism.
Alas, that was not the path President Obama chose, with predictable and inevitable political consequences. Of course, older white voters were not placated, Republicans never found it within themselves to compromise, the economic recovery proved anemic, and Obama now faces reelection with a demoralized and unenthusiastic base. The young voters and eager activists that flooded into his campaign and fueled his victory in 2008 are nowhere to be seen, Latinos are furious over his failure to pursue immigration reform, liberals are disgusted with the condition-free bailout of Wall Street, and Americans everywhere are still waiting for any financier to be brought to justice for causing the collapse of 2008. At this point, even African Americans are beginning to ask what they got and how they benefitted from electing the nation’s first black president.
Obama’s only saving grace at this point is the disarray and delusion in the Republican ranks; but he cannot count on Republicans’ tenuous grasp on reality or their internecine squabbling to guarantee victory in November. If President Obama is going to win, he needs to articulate and vigorously defend a principled program that will, first and foremost, appeal to his political base. Despite his impressive victory in 2008, he will find it difficult to win if Hispanics sit on their hands, young people stay at home, African Americans barely drag themselves to the polls, and liberal whites vote without spirit election day. Although Obama faces a weak and divided Republican opposition, he still has his work cut out for him. Although he campaigned as a visionary in 2008, he has governed as a technocrat. He has lost the enthusiastic backing of his base and failed to connect emotionally with the American public. In order to win he needs to articulate his values clearly and forcefully and defend them with passion and conviction to voters.
Douglas S. Massey is Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University.
There has been relatively little debate on education in the primaries so far, (although state level debates have been heating up all year). The topic of educational reform could prove decisive, however. Christopher Loss, historian and author of Between Citizens and the State recently shared his insights on contemporary education politics and what the polls tell us about what aspects of educational reform are likely to garner the most support in Election 2012. Read his Election 101 post here:
The economy and jobs will be the two biggest issues in this fall’s general election, but education will also factor in who votes for which candidate and why. Voters looking for major policy differences between the two candidates this November will have to look pretty hard to find any. Indeed, the striking thing about contemporary education politics is just how much agreement there is among policymakers and the public that the education system is broken and needs to be fixed.
Let’s begin with the K-12 sector. Anyone who has a child in a public school understands by now that the education landscape has changed dramatically since the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002. The act’s basic features are well known. The states must annually test students in math and reading in grades 3-8, and all students must be “proficient” in these subjects by 2014. Schools that fail to make “annual yearly progress” (AYP) face increasingly severe “corrective actions”—staff can be fired, a new curriculum installed, and longer school days instituted. If improvements aren’t made, failing schools can be taken over by a private company or even closed.
The latest findings of the highly respected Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools suggests that the public supports key aspects of the educational reform agenda that NCLB enshrined. The 2011 poll found that most Americans like their own child’s school but are skeptical of the nation’s education system writ large; they want quality teachers who are fairly compensated; they increasingly like charter schools; and they are more dubious than ever about public sector unions. President Obama has garnered the support of the major teacher unions despite embracing an education agenda that differs little from that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Race to the Top, the President’s signature education reform, has extended the NCLB framework, providing competitive federal grants to states willing to try experiments (i.e., “reforms”) that link teacher pay and performance to student achievement. The distinction between Obama and his predecessor is purely a semantic one—a distinction without a difference.
Governor Mitt Romney, the President’s likely opponent in November, also bows down at the altar of reform, having sworn allegiance to its major commandments: consumer choice, accountability, standards, and testing. As governor he tried and failed to overhaul Massachusetts’ education system, whose students routinely rank among the best performing in the country. None of this had anything to do with Romney’s one-term in office, but that won’t prevent him from boasting about it during the campaign. Where Romney and his party diverge from the President is in their call for even more parental choice and greater access to charter schools. Small-government conservatism, despite all the evidence to the contrary, remains the heart’s blood of the Republican Party. Romney’s support for parental empowerment speaks to that core belief as well as to his party’s larger “family values” agenda, in particular the current cause célèbre of rightwing educational reformers, home schooling.
Higher education, long an afterthought in presidential elections, might figure more prominently in this year’s contest. In his State of the Union Address in January, President Obama’s promise to clamp down on the sector by linking federal funding to student outcomes generated a flurry of debate. Is a new era of NCLB-like federal oversight of higher education in the offing? Or is this just an election-year ploy to stir the passions of the college-educated voting bloc who supported Obama in record numbers four years ago? Either way the President touched a raw nerve. The public has grown concerned over rapidly rising college costs, declining state funding, spiraling student loan debt, high dropout rates, and reports of lackluster learning on campuses across the country.
The problem is that most education leaders agree that the sort of heavy handed federal regulation that has been brought to bear on the K-12 system would ruin America’s great system of colleges and universities. It’s a system with its own brand of self-regulation—admission and degree requirements, peer review and tenure, accrediting boards and professional licensure exams—that works very well. It’s a system that offers students a wide range of institutional and price options. Most important of all, it’s a system whose energy and creativity flow from the freedom it gives faculty and students to think, research, teach, and learn.
Therein lies the catch: unlike other areas of social policy, when it comes to the politics of higher education the usual mix of regulation and/or spending cuts don’t make the grade. If the President pushes too hard for regulation he might alienate the “educated classes” whose support he needs to win. The stakes are even greater for Romney. If he embraces federal regulation in higher education, as George W. Bush did in K-12 with NCLB, it might weaken his claim to the small government, free market credentials that matter so much to the Republican base and that his past support for health care reform has already brought into doubt.
Taking their lead from state houses around the country, the candidates could support spending cuts. President Obama has consistently supported increased spending on higher education, most recently in his proposed budget, and that seems unlikely to change. Romney is in a tougher spot. The recent budget passed by the GOP-controlled House—an ideological showpiece that had no chance of making it out of the Democratic-led Senate—included deep cuts in education spending. His instinct as governor was to cut spending; and that’s been the theme of his campaign. The problem is that slashing funding for student aid does not exactly exude the “politics of hope” that the electorate typically prefers in its presidential candidates. Besides, at the national level dramatic funding cuts are harder to come by, particularly when the powerful higher education lobby is keeping close watch and when there are 18 million students enrolled in higher education, an overwhelming majority of whom rely on federal dollars of one form or another to stay in school.
That leaves the candidates with a final option—to do nothing. This is exactly why students and their families, and the colleges they attend, are in the pinch they are now. Aside from making more and more aid available, neither party has had any strategy at all for higher education for fifty years. Whether the candidates can come up with one in the next six months is anyone’s guess.
Christopher P. Loss is assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University.
UCLA political scienctist Michael L. Ross appeared recently in Los Angeles at the terrific public program venue Zócalo Public Square to talk about his important and timely new book THE OIL CURSE: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations. You can watch 3:00 minutes of his talk here and the rest of it at the Zócalo website. Enjoy!
We were pleased to see in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review a nod to our classic bestseller THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly as an influential book on Capitol Hill. The back page Essay, by Emily Parker, was a fascinating look at the books being read and influencing policy in Washington. There are some other goodies here that have just made my reading list! 
In Between Citizens and the State, public policy expert and historian of higher education Christopher Loss takes a fascinating look at the close and sometimes fraught relations between American higher education and politics. I recently asked him to shed some light on Governor Christie’s new proposal in New Jersey that would result in the merger of Rutgers-Camden University with Rowan University under the name Rowan, as well as give Rutgers’ main campus in New Brunswick three of UMDNJ’s pieces— Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, the School of Public Health and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey. The plan has been met by support on one side of the issue by both democrats and republicans who argue the plan could potentially remake South Jersey—a region with less educational opportunity than the wealthier northern part of the state—as a center of intellectual and economic success by creating an additional ‘research university’, fueling widespread investment in Camden similar to the renaissance that has transformed the West Philadelphia neighborhood of UPENN. Others, including many in the community at Rutgers-Camden, lament that Ru-Camden would have to adopt the name of what is currently a lesser-known university. The growth projected by the merger is unrealistic, they say, the two institutions are too different, and the cost of implementing the plan would be astronomical. Read on for a Q&A with Christopher Loss about the merger and the national conversation on higher education after the jump:
Q: Chris, Is this an undemocratic initiative on the part of the state that disregards the rights and character of a locally cherished institution, as some have claimed, or a case where government is using its power to promote short-term sacrifice from the few in order to ensure what would purportedly be a more promising future economically and educationally for the many?
Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) promised to do some new things with K-12 and higher education when he was campaigning for office, and as far as he’s concerned that’s exactly what he’s been doing. He convened a Task Force to evaluate New Jersey’s higher education sector, and now he’s trying to follow through on some of the recommendations included in that report. Originally it was thought the Task Force, headed by former governor Tom Kean (R-NJ), would only focus on changes to the troubled University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). That’s not what happened. The preliminary report did not even mention the Rutgers-Camden/Rowan University merger, so when that appeared in the final report many New Jersey residents were understandably upset—especially those who graduated from, currently attend, or now work at Rutgers-Camden and don’t want to lose their longstanding relationship with the Rutgers University system by merging with the lesser-known Rowan University, located in Glassboro twenty miles away. The process may seem somewhat undemocratic, in so far as the people haven’t voted on anything and much of what’s been accomplished so far has been done by Executive Order. But, then again, nothing has really happened yet and there are plenty of checks in place that will soon enough give voice to other vested interests in the state. Rutger’s has two governing boards—the Board of Governors and the Board of Trustees—and they would need to approve the split with the Camden campus as well as Rutgers-New Brunswick’s merger with the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Rowan University has a board and, while they appear ready to acquire Rutgers-Camden, there’s a process there that will need to be followed. Then there’s the matter of funding and the role of the state legislature, which will also get a say in the process, assuming it moves forward. Mergers of this sort are never cheap, and so the state will probably need to float a bond to cover the cost of splitting and merging these different institutions.
Overall, I’d say the process that has unfolded over the course of the last few months is pretty typical for the higher education arena and is certainly consistent with what is going on in lots of states right now. Similar to New Jersey, New York and Georgia are entertaining proposals to streamline their higher education sectors, and every state governor has higher education high on her list of agenda items. Why? Well, partly it’s because so much of the state-budget process is absorbed by fixed costs for entitlement programs of one sort or another, there isn’t as much room for good, old fashioned horse trading as there used to be. The one area where there’s money to move around and to fight over is higher education. Even though state-level appropriations have fallen below 8 percent nationally, and New Jersey, like most states, has been cutting funding in recent years, governors still have “skin in the game,” as they say, as well as statutory authority to insert themselves into the process. Most important, higher education politics plays well with constituents: nineteen of the twenty-one counties in New Jersey is home to a county college (what most people know as a community college), and many counties have multiple institutions, especially in the heavily populated north. These schools all bring jobs and the prospects of economic growth to their respective regions as well as to the entire state.
But higher education is also incredibly difficult to change. Passions run deep at American colleges and universities—they are like nations unto themselves. They command incredible regional, even national, allegiances and that’s one of the reasons why the Rutgers-Camden/Rowan merger promises to get hotter before it cools down. Rutgers (opened in 1766 as Queens College) is one of the original nine colonial colleges and the people who work at and attend the Camden campus don’t want to lose that relationship. It’s understandable and surprising, since usually mergers work the other way: the lesser known institution is absorbed by the better-known one. But that’s why you need to look at what is trying to be achieved. If the desire is to build a true research university in southern New Jersey, well, the recipe the Task Force has suggested is probably the correct one. The nation’s leading research universities virtually all include a medical college (Princeton is one notable exception). The proposed merger would significantly strengthen Rutgers-New Brunswick’s position with the acquisition of Robert Wood Johnson, and it would create a similarly configured institution at the new Rowan University, whose medical school is set to open next fall. Rowan has a long way to go before it will approach the research capacity of other leading medical school and university hospitals around the country, including the highly regarded Robert Wood Johnson School, but the pieces are at least in place. The definition of what a research university is and does is always changing, but if creating research capacity is a key goal, then having a medical school in the organizational mix (along with a business and law school) makes some sense. Readers might want to consult Hugh Davis Graham’s wonderful study, The Rise of American Research Universities, for more on the importance of medical schools and hospitals in helping aspiring institutions achieve national prominence.
Q: How is this proposal consistent with historical trends you examine in your book?
I can think of a number. First, the desire to consolidate state systems has been ongoing since the post-World War II era, when enrollments started to climb dramatically thanks to the GI Bill and to the spread of federal funding for military and medical research. It was during this time that states started creating advisory and governing boards to coordinate their higher education sector, to increase access and geographic diversity on the one hand, and to prevent programmatic redundancies on the other. The best example of this is California. Chancellor Clark Kerr implemented the so-called “Master Plan” (1960) that linked the state’s junior (two-year) colleges, state colleges, and universities into one gigantic system. It was heralded as a technocratic triumph; Time magazine put him on the cover. Fifty years later that system is on life support and there are talks of closings and consolidations there, too.
This suggests a second parallel between past and present: one effort to streamline and coordinate state systems of higher education lead to another. There have been at least two other proposals by New Jersey governors in the last decade to reorganize or in some way reform the operation of the state’s diverse mix of higher education institutions—a mix that consists of 66 schools (31 of which are public) and enrolls nearly a half million students, most of whom attend a county college. It’s a tall order and history shows that most efforts to reorder state systems end up delivering checkered results. An improvement or efficiency in one area leads to a problem in another. America’s plural system of colleges and universities strongly resists coordination for the reasons I’ve discussed. This is a problem, but it’s also one of the sector’s real strengths. It doesn’t always look like it from the outside, but universities have a real ability to adapt to new needs and demands. They are creative institutions and much of that creativity springs from the freedom that faculty and students have to teach, research, and learn.
Finally, Governor Christie has presented his plan as more or less an economic stimulus proposal for the state. Two big, powerful public research universities are better than one, seems to be the argument. Rutgers is already a big player, and it will become even bigger with a medical school. The situation at Rowan is much less clear to me. Maybe in twenty or thirty years the new Rowan University will have realized its potential as a national center for undergraduate and graduate education, and for professional training in law, business, and medicine. I doubt it: it’s got a long road ahead and it will face stiff competition from an empowered Rutgers University that no longer has any real stake in the southern part of the state. It seems much more likely that Rutgers will rapidly ascend the ranks while Rowan will have to play catch up. It takes time to build an institutional identity, and Rutgers is way ahead of Rowan in that respect. Rowan is a solid regional institution that has lots of wonderful faculty and programs and educates a lot of students. But it’s a different institution than Rutgers and people shouldn’t expect it to become “Rutgers South” overnight. In fact, because Rutgers won’t have much of a presence at all in southern New Jersey, residents there who want a Rutgers education will now have to move to New Brunswick or Newark to get one. That’s too bad. I think public flagships should offer opportunities all across their states, as they do in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and North Carolina. Residents pay into the system; they should be able to access it. Finally, and this is something that has not been discussed much, not all the jobs now at Rutgers-Camden and Rowan will survive a merger. They never do.
Q: In your opinion, are citizens of today more or less inclined to want to invest faith and time in such grand plans than they were during other eras, when the university system was still being built up?
The American people have very short time horizons. We want results quickly or we tend not to want them at all. The proof that we have such short time horizons is in the fact that we’ve been having many of the same debates about higher education and how to improve it for decades and decades. Truly, there has never been a time in this country when there wasn’t some discussion about how to make higher education better. You can go back to the 1828 Yale Report—a defense of liberal arts education—and find more or less the same arguments in University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America, published in 1936, or in Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, published in the 1980s. Early education reformers accused the old denominational colleges of being outmoded and useless—that was in the mid-nineteenth century. The perceived inadequacy of the old college encouraged education reformers, like President Charles Eliot of Harvard and President Daniel Gilman of Johns Hopkins, to imagine a whole new educational model. What they and others dreamed up became the American research university. It was hardly fail proof: by the 1920s it was discovered that a third of all first-year students dropped out of school and only half actually graduated. Again, we think of student retention as a contemporary problem when it has been one for the last hundred years. American higher education has always been a revolving door: some students come and stay while others turn around and leave. During the 1930s many educators wondered if four years was too long for an undergraduate degree and if it should be shortened. That’s been discussed lately, too. So has the reform of college sports, which educators have been wringing their hand over since the first decade of the last century. President Teddy Roosevelt convened a meeting at the White House in 1905 that ultimately led to the creation of the NCAA in 1906. Finally, there’s the biggie: rising college costs. This has always been an issue to someone somewhere, and to almost everyone everywhere since 1970. For the past four decades college costs have been outpacing inflation, but it’s only now become a national issue with high visibility. And the list goes on.
Q: Can you bring any of this anxiety and doubt in New Jersey to bear on the current national conversation around higher education reform?
Students and their families (and lots of policymakers) are understandably frustrated by what they perceive to be the higher education system’s erratic results in recent years. The economic downturn has really made this issue worse, because graduates have been struggling to find good jobs, and roughly 10 percent can’t find any at all. This is why we’re now talking about reforming higher education, perhaps along the lines of what was instituted at the K-12 level with NCLB. Everyone heard it a few weeks ago: President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, put higher education “on notice” that things were going to change, that he intended to pursue new reforms that linked federal aid to performance and outcomes. This may or may not happen. It’s really too early to tell. What is clear to me, however, is that promises to graduate every student, to guarantee that every student will learn the same amount, and that she will find a great job, are simply unrealistic. We’ve never been able to ensure that all students will graduate, or learn the same, or find the job of their dreams—and we never will. What we’ve done in this country is created a broad-access system that affords most any student with a high school diploma and a SAT score with a shot at higher learning. The strength of the system we have is the amount of choice it provides—the wide range of institutional and pricing options. This is often overlooked in our conversations. The media always zero-in on what are actually outlier institutions, like Harvard or Berkeley, and cite anecdotal evidence, then generalize across the whole higher education sector and all students, as if it’s all the same. Most students don’t go to residential colleges. Most students aren’t traditionally aged. Most students don’t have endless free time. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Most students in this country go to public regional comprehensive institutions, like Rowan University, or to a community college. Most students are also older and commute to class. And, finally, most students work and go to school.
In short, our system is a complex, multilayered one that includes a mix of different institutional types—two- and four-year schools, nonprofit and for-profit, commuter and residential—that truly boggles the mind. So, before we get ahead of ourselves and start trying to reinvent the wheel, we should study all those past efforts to change higher education and see what’s worked and what hasn’t. History teaches us many things.
Christopher P. Loss is assistant professor of public policy and higher education at Vanderbilt University.
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