[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 94 (Tuesday, July 19, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 19, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                      THE FALL OF THE IVORY TOWER

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                          HON. PHILIP M. CRANE

                              of illinois

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 19, 1994

  Mr. CRANE. Mr. Speaker, as Congress is in the midst of the annual 
appropriation process, I believe that it is a good time to review the 
success of the programs on which we are spending our constituents' hard 
earned tax dollars.
  Just as the Federal Government's involvement in public housing has 
produced the war-torn streets surrounding Cabrini Green in Chicago, the 
Government's involvement in education has had similar detrimental 
effects on our Nation's students. Universities in particular have 
stopped teaching and are more concerned with receiving their annual 
Federal dole. Rather than waste valuable professors on students, 
universities involve their professors in programs to ensure that the 
school receives Federal grants, leaving the teaching of undergraduate 
to less experienced graduate students.
  Dr. George Roche, president of Hillsdale College, my alma mater, has 
just completed a thorough study of America's university system, 
providing an insider's look--without an insider's bias--into the 
feeding frenzy at the public trough. George Roche and Hillsdale are not 
recipients of this Federal largess, they receive all their money from 
private and corporate sponsors.
  The July 7, 1994 Wall Street Journal contains a book review of Dr. 
Roche's compilation of his study called ``The Fall of the Ivory 
Tower.'' I include the book review and commend it to the attention of 
my colleagues. Furthermore, I encourage them to obtain a copy of the 
book and read and learn from Dr. Roche.

              [From the Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1994]

                       Universities Mad for Money

                         (By Stephen H. Balch)

       America's Utopians have traditionally been optimists. 
     Rather than seeking to ``level down'' like their European 
     counterparts, their passion has been to make everyone a 
     winner. Opportunity--not redistribution--has been their 
     theme.
       The greatest monument to this dream of universal success is 
     a system of higher education some part of which nearly half 
     of all Americans have passed through, an astounding figure by 
     any comparison. But American higher education's massive 
     expansion has required an equally massive infusion of public 
     funds, thereby massively transforming its character.
       Hillsdale, a small private liberal-arts colleges in 
     Michigan, has been one of the very few academic institutions 
     to steadfastly refuse the government's largesse. In ``The 
     Fall of the Ivory Tower'' (Regnery, 310 pages, $24), George 
     Roche, Hillsdale's president, persuasively demonstrates how 
     the eagerness of most other colleges and universities to 
     feast at the public table has progressively robbed them of 
     autonomy, compromised their standards, and in many cases 
     brought them to the verge of bankruptcy. For those few still 
     inclined to visualize the academy as a province of fussy dons 
     and ethereal speculation. Mr. Roche provides a detailed 
     inventory of the self-serving bureaucracies, lobbies and 
     hardball politics that now govern its life and fortunes.
       Mr. Roche heads an institution that stopped accepting 
     students receiving federal aid after the Supreme Court ruled 
     that the practice would subject it to a panoply of federal 
     regulation. He is particularly caustic in his account of 
     academic administrators who treat taxpayer money as a free 
     good, quoting from internal directives advising them to 
     assign every manner of peripherally related expenditure to 
     the cost-sharing required by federal research programs. ``As 
     far as your office is concerned, Mecca is also referred to as 
     Washington, D.C.,'' proclaims one pamphlet prepared for 
     novice grants officers by the Association of American 
     Colleges.
       Throughout, Mr. Roche paints a disturbing but accurate 
     picture of the invasive consequences of financial dependence. 
     The systematic pressure to reduce hiring policies to ethno-
     sexual patronage rightly draws his heaviest fire, though 
     here, for ideological reasons, the academy has proved an 
     enthusiastic accomplice in its own destruction. But even the 
     most progressive of administrators are now warning that 
     federal regulations extend to, among many other things, the 
     assessment of ``academic outcomes,'' and call forth a host of 
     government agencies to bedevil institutions deemed deficient.
       Mr. Roche's central argument is that the government's 
     extravagant subsidy of higher education (now annually almost 
     $40 billion at the federal level alone) has done precious 
     little to efficiently educate. Instead, it has insulated 
     academic institutions from market forces, fostering the giddy 
     illusion--born during the government's flush years--that 
     Uncle Sam's pockets are bottomless. Not only have 
     institutions become financially overextended--burdened by 
     excess plant, deferred maintenance and swollen, mischievous 
     bureaucracy; priorities have become distorted, slighting the 
     classroom in the pursuit of lucrative research; and highly 
     subsidized demand has allowed tuition to rise to seemingly 
     extortionate levels.
       In his discussion of how senior research-oriented faculty 
     have relegated undergraduate instruction to inadequately 
     prepared, underpaid teaching assistants and adjuncts, Mr. 
     Roche traverses well-charted ground. As he and other critics 
     view this process, it has largely involved the substitution 
     of such frivolous and self-indulgent preoccupations as 
     ``Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female 
     Body'' for serious pursuit.
       But while it has become easy to mock the zany 
     preoccupations of contemporary scholars in the humanities, 
     the contributions of our research universities to scientific 
     knowledge and technical progress have in fact been immense. 
     The problem derives less from misplaced priorities than from 
     an unwillingness to state them with candor. Truth in 
     advertising about institutional mission, and a more 
     rigorously enforced division of labor among institutions and 
     within faculties, would not only reduce the element of 
     perceived ``scam'' in academic life, but force a salutary re-
     examination of competing research interests.
       Mr. Roche's treatment of tuition inflation, tuition 
     manipulation and the opportunities afforded by artificially 
     high ``sticker prices'' to shift costs among students, and 
     onto the taxpayer, is sharp, illuminating and likely to 
     provoke the indignation of readers. His analyses of 
     curricular decay, political correctness, the resegregation of 
     our campuses, as well as the increasingly brazen efforts by 
     colleges and universities to debunk conventional notions of 
     sexual morality, while not novel, are also incisively made. 
     Vacuous curriculums and dogmatism could hardly flourish among 
     institutions in uncushioned markets.
       As suggested by the book's title, Mr. Roche portrays an 
     academic establishment heading for a fall. With a growing 
     awareness of inadequacy and scandal, and with government 
     under heavy pressure to retrench, universities and 
     colleages--particularly private ones--will have to shape up 
     or go down. In this predicament he wisely finds reason for 
     hope. Having long pursued Utopia, the American academy will 
     finally be required to learn some lessons from life.

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