[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 159 (Tuesday, December 13, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13468-S13469]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            HIGHER EDUCATION

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed 
in the Record a statement I made to the Secretary of Education's 
Commission on the Future of Higher Education on December 9, 2005, in 
Nashville.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

  A National Dialogue: The Secretary of Education's Commission on the 
                       Future of Higher Education

       Thank you for the time you are giving to this Commission's 
     work, and thank you for inviting me to testify.
       I've seen higher education from many sides, so I'm 
     sometimes asked, ``What's harder: being governor of a state, 
     a member of a president's cabinet, or president of a 
     university?''
       My answer is: ``Obviously, you've never been president of a 
     university, or you wouldn't ask such a question.''
       I have six suggestions for recommendations you might make.
       First, I hope you will urge the Administration that 
     appointed you to make the National Academies' ``Augustine 
     Report'' a focus of the President's State of the Union 
     address in January and of his remaining three years in 
     office.
       This 20-point, $10 billion a year report is the National 
     Academies' answer to the following question that Senator Pete 
     Domenici, Senator Jeff Bingaman and I posed to them in May: 
     ``What are the ten top actions, in priority order, that 
     federal policy makers could take to enhance the science and 
     technology enterprise so the United States can successfully 
     compete, prosper and be secure in the global community of the 
     21st century?'' The report was written by a distinguished 
     panel of business, government, and university leaders headed 
     by Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin.
       As 2005 ends, we Americans--who constitute just five 
     percent of the world's population--will once again produce 
     nearly thirty percent of the world's wealth.
       Most of this good fortune comes from the American advantage 
     in brainpower: an educated workforce, and our science and 
     technology. More Americans go to college than in any country. 
     Our universities are the world's best, attracting more than 
     500,000 of the brightest foreign students. No country has 
     national research laboratories to match ours. Americans have 
     won the most Nobel Prizes in science, and have registered the 
     most patents. We have invented the internet, the automobile 
     and the computer chip, television and electricity. From such 
     advances have come a steady flow of the world's best paying 
     jobs.
       As one scientist has said, we don't have science and 
     technology because we're rich. We're rich because we have 
     science and technology.
       Yet I am worried that America may be losing its brainpower 
     advantage. Most Americans who travel to China, India, 
     Finland, Singapore and Ireland come home saying, ``Watch 
     out.''
       The Augustine panel found I am right to be worried:
       Last year, China trained 500,000 engineers, India 200,000, 
     while the U.S. trained 70,000.
       For the cost of one chemist or engineer in the U.S., a 
     company can hire five chemists in China or 11 engineers in 
     India.
       China is spending billions to recruit the best Chinese 
     scientists from American universities to return home to build 
     up Chinese universities.
       They also found signs that we are not keeping up:
       U.S. 12th graders performed below the international average 
     of 21 leading countries on tests of general knowledge in 
     math.
       In 2003, only three American companies ranked among the top 
     10 recipients of new U.S. patents.
       Of 120 new chemical plants being built around the word with 
     price tags of $1 billion or more, one is in the U.S. and 50 
     are in China.
       Among the Augustine Report's twenty recommendations were:
       Recruit 10,000 new science and math teachers with four year 
     scholarships and train 250,000 current teachers in summer 
     institutes.
       Triple the number of students who take Advanced Placement 
     math and science exams.
       Increase federal funding for basic research in the physical 
     sciences by 10 percent a year for seven years.
       Provide 30,000 scholarships and graduate fellowships for 
     scientists.
       Give foreign students who earn a PhD in science, 
     engineering and computing a ``green card'' so they can live 
     and work here.
       Give American companies a bigger research and development 
     tax credit so they will keep their good jobs here instead of 
     moving them offshore.
       Some may wince at the $10 billion a year price tag. I 
     believe that the cost is low. America's brainpower advantage 
     has not come on the cheap. This year, one-third of state and 
     local budgets go to fund education. Over fifty percent of 
     American students have a federal grant or loan to help pay 
     for college. The Federal government spends nearly $30 billion 
     per year this year on research at universities, and another 
     $34 billion to fund 36 national research laboratories.
       Just this year, Congress has authorized $75 billion to 
     fight the war in Iraq, $71 billion for hurricane recovery, 
     $13 billion in increased Medicaid spending and $352 billion 
     to finance the national debt. If we fail to invest the funds 
     necessary to keep our brainpower advantage, we'll not have an 
     economy capable of producing enough money to pay the bills 
     for war, Social Security, hurricanes, Medicaid, and debt.
       Aside from the war on terror, there is no greater challenge 
     than maintaining our brainpower advantage so we can keep our 
     good paying jobs. That is the surest way to keep America on 
     top.

[[Page S13469]]

       Second, I suggest that you recommend that Presidents of the 
     United States appoint a lead advisor to coordinate all of the 
     federal government responsibilities for higher education.
       My greatest regret as U.S. Education Secretary was that I 
     did not volunteer to be that lead person. Secretary 
     Spellings, with the appointment of this commission, has 
     assumed at least some of that responsibility. But the 
     authority of the Secretary of Education over higher education 
     is somewhat like the authority of the U.S. Senate Majority 
     leader or a university president: overestimated. Almost every 
     agency of the federal government has something to do with 
     higher education, tens of billions of taxpayer dollars are 
     invested every year and someone should be looking at all of 
     this in a coordinated way.
       Third, I urge you to join me on the bandwagon for 
     deregulation of higher education.
       The greatest threat to the quality of American higher 
     education is not underfunding, it is overregulation. The key 
     to the quality of our higher education system is that it is 
     not a system. It is a marketplace of 6,000 autonomous 
     institutions. Yet, thanks largely to the last two rounds of 
     the federal Higher Education Act, each one of our 6,000 
     higher education institutions that accepts students with 
     federal grants and loans must wade through over 7,000 
     regulations and notices. The President of Stanford has 
     said that seven cents of every tuition dollar is spent on 
     compliance with governmental regulations.
       Fourth, I urge the Congress to overhaul the Medicaid 
     program and free states from outdated federal court consent 
     decrees so that states may properly fund colleges and 
     universities.
       You have two charts before you that tell the story. 
     Nationally, during the five year period from 2000 to 2004, 
     state spending for Medicaid was up 36 percent, while state 
     spending for higher education was up only 6.8 percent. As one 
     result, tuition was up 38 percent.
       The story in Tennessee was worse. Medicaid spending was up 
     71 percent, while higher education was up only 10.5 percent, 
     and tuition was up 43 percent.
       By the way, during this same four year period, federal 
     spending for higher education was up 71 percent.
       When I left the governor's office in 1987, Tennessee was 
     spending 51 cents of each state tax dollar on education and 
     16 cents on health care, mainly Medicaid. Today it is 40 
     cents on education and 26 cents on health care, mainly 
     Medicaid.
       To give governors and legislatures the proper authority to 
     allocate resources, Congress should give states more 
     authority over Medicaid standards and more ability to 
     terminate outdated federal court consent decrees that remove 
     decision-making authority from elected officials.
       Fifth, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest 
     disappointment in higher education today: Colleges of 
     Education.
       ``At a time when America's schools face a critical demand 
     for effective principals and superintendents, the majority of 
     programs that prepare school leaders range in quality from 
     inadequate to poor.'' Those are not my words, but those of a 
     new report by Arthur Levine, the President of Teachers 
     College, Columbia University. Or ask Richard Light, the 
     Harvard professor, who is working with university presidents 
     trying to find and inspire a new generation of leaders for 
     our colleges of education. Sometimes colleges of education 
     are even roadblocks to the very reforms they ought to be 
     championing. In 1983, when I asked colleges of education to 
     help me find a fair way to pay teachers more for teaching 
     well (which not one state was doing at the time), they said 
     it couldn't be done. So we invented our own system for 
     thousands of teachers, with virtually no help from the very 
     people who are in business to figure out such things. And 
     still today, despite the good work of Governor Hunt and 
     others, the lack of differential pay is the major obstacle to 
     quality teaching.
       Finally, I hope you will put a spotlight on the greatest 
     threat to broader public support and funding for higher 
     education: the growing political one-sidedness which has 
     infected most campuses, and an absence of true diversity of 
     opinion.
       To describe this phenomenon, allow me to borrow some words 
     from the past which may sound familiar to your chairman, 
     Charles Miller, who was once Chairman of the Board of regents 
     of the University of Texas: ``systematic, persistent and 
     continuous attempts by a politically dominant group to impose 
     its social and educational views on the university.'' This 
     was what the American Association of University Professors 
     (AAUP) called it in its censure of Texas Governor Pappy 
     O'Daniel's Board of Regents when the Board fired University 
     of Texas President Homer Rainey in the 1940's. This is 
     reported in Willie Morris' book, North Toward Home. Then the 
     AAUP was talking about one-sidedness imposed by the right, 
     instead of by the left--but political one-sidedness is 
     political one-sidedness, no matter from what direction it 
     comes.
       There is more to this charge of one-sidedness than the 
     academic community would like to admit. How many conservative 
     speakers are invited to deliver commencement addresses? How 
     many colleges require courses in U.S. history? How many even 
     teach Western Civilization? How many bright, young faculty 
     members are encouraged to earn dissertations in the failures 
     of bilingual education, or on the virtues of vouchers or 
     charter schools?
       I am not surprised that most faculties express liberal 
     views, vote Democratic and that most faculty members resist 
     authority. That is the nature of most university communities. 
     But I am disappointed when true diversity of thought is 
     discouraged in the name of a preferred brand of diversity. 
     This one-sidedness is not good for students. It is not good 
     for the pursuit of truth. And it undermines broad public 
     support for higher education. The solution to this political 
     rigidity lies not in Washington, D.C., but in the hands of 
     trustees, deans and faculty members themselves.
       Last year Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas invited 
     former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso to join 
     a small group of U.S. Senators in the Majority Leader's 
     office for a discussion. Dr. Cardoso was completing a 
     residency at the Library of Congress.
       ``What memory of the United States will you take back to 
     your country?'' Senator Hutchison asked Dr. Cardoso.
       ``The American university,'' he replied immediately. ``The 
     uniqueness, strength and autonomy of the American university. 
     There is nothing like it in the world.''
       I salute Secretary Spellings and this Commission for 
     undertaking to preserve and improve higher education, 
     America's secret weapon for its future success. In coming to 
     your conclusions, I hope that you will urge the President to 
     adopt the Augustine Report and to designate a lead advisor 
     for higher education, that you will jump on the bandwagon to 
     deregulate higher education and preserve its autonomy, that 
     you will urge Congress to overhaul Medicaid and federal court 
     consent decrees so states can properly fund higher education, 
     and that you will urge trustees to revamp Colleges of 
     Education and ensure a campus environment that honors true 
     diversity of opinion.

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, Secretary Spellings has appointed this 
commission to look at the future of higher education. Other than the 
war against terror, keeping our brain power advantage so we can create 
new jobs here in the United States and keep our jobs from going to 
China, India, Finland, and Ireland, is the biggest challenge we face as 
a nation.
  I made a statement before the Commission on the Future of Higher 
Education that it adopt the recommendations of the National Academies' 
``Augustine Report'' and urge the President to make it a focus of his 
State of the Union Address. The report recommends 20 steps to keep that 
brain power advantage, and was written by a distinguished panel of 
business, government, and university leaders headed by Norm Augustine, 
former CEO of Lockheed Martin.
  I also urged the commission to make certain that we deregulate higher 
education; to make certain that the President appoints an adviser to 
coordinate all of the Federal Government's responsibilities for higher 
education; to urge Congress to overhaul Medicaid so States may properly 
fund higher education; to put a spotlight on the greatest 
disappointment in higher education today, our colleges of education; 
and, finally, to put a spotlight on the greatest threat to broader 
public support for funding of higher education, the growing political 
one-sidedness which has infected most campuses in an absence of true 
diversity of opinion.
  I salute Secretary Spellings and her distinguished commission. I look 
forward to their recommendations. There could not be a more important 
subject to our country's future for them to consider than how do we 
take this remarkable system of higher education that we built in this 
country--the best in the world--and strengthen it so it can play a 
pivotal role in helping Americans keep good-paying jobs in the United 
States.
  Thank you, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Delaware.

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