Federal Aid: Too Many Strings?

Universities welcome the cash, but fear more controls

Government aid to U.S. colleges and universities--mostly student loans, research grants and special-program funds--now totals an impressive $15 billion a year. Yet more and more educators, administrators and trustees are biting the hand that feeds them. Their complaints range from excessive paperwork to inflexible regulations. But the one that is voiced most emphatically concerns Washington's growing influence over higher education. Says Robert Durkee of the Association of American Universities: "We may be nearing a point where the Government will be making decisions that universities should be making."

Exaggerated? Not by much, as several recent developments indicate. Among the most notable:

>The Department of Justice has threatened to sue Brigham Young University and 36 Provo, Utah, landlords for violation of the Fair Housing Act. Replying to Government charges that it is illegal to refuse housing on the basis of sex--even in off-campus college apartments--B.Y.U. President Dallin H. Oaks noted that enforcement of such a law "would make separate men's and women's dormitories illegal on every campus in the country."

>A recent addition to the Health Professions Educational Assistance Act made financial aid to U.S. medical schools contingent upon acceptance of third-year medical students who have been trained abroad. Johns Hopkins and 17 other medical schools threatened to forfeit Government money rather than comply with the ruling. In December the legislation was changed to encourage, rather than require, medical schools to accept a small percentage of their enrollment from Americans studying abroad.

>Hillsdale College in southern Michigan has rejected direct federal aid since its founding in 1844. The college decided to ignore the controversial Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, which ruled that if any students in a college receive federal assistance, the school must be classified as a "recipient institution" and must comply with the hundreds of regulations imposed on Government-supported schools by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Hillsdale has launched a $29 million fund drive to aid its students should the Government refuse to provide their loans and scholarships.

>The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has rejected three desegregation plans submitted by the 16-campus University of North Carolina and threatened to cut off some of the $89 million that it receives in aid each year. U.N.C. President William Friday insists that the system is "committed to" desegregation and that the real dispute centers on Washington's "intrusion" into university affairs.

Educators argue that the Government gives with one hand and takes with the other. Judging from the figures in one recent study by the American Council on Education, it costs higher education some $2 billion a year to carry out such federally mandated programs as affirmative action and regulations issued by agencies like OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration). And there are incidental expenses. A single affirmative-action study at Berkeley, for example, generated 50,000 computer calculations. Complains Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California system and now Chairman of the Carnegie Council Policy Studies in Higher Education: "Such details as how many native American Indians the classics department, which now has about five people, should employ by the year 2003 was required by Federal Government planning. The answer was .08. That's silly; people do not come in those kinds of units."

Kerr's complaints are echoed by Johns Hopkins President Steven Muller, who objects to the Government's practice of requiring universities to supply the same information to more than one federal agency. Last year the Internal Revenue Service did a full audit of Hopkins. "We spent literally thousands of hours of staff time answering the same questions for them that we had answered for the General Accounting Office," says Muller. "Then they wanted to look at our affirmative-action programs--information we had already given to the Office of Civil Rights."

The problem is particularly acute for research universities, where two-thirds of all scientific research is carried on with the support of the Government. According to the Cambridge-based Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, the "harmonious relationship" between the Government and the universities that flourished during World War II has deteriorated into "an atmosphere of friction and confrontation."

The Government has candidly acknowledged the crisis. Not long after his election, President Carter met with HEW Secretary Joseph Califano and a group of college presidents to discuss problems of higher education. In the fall, HEW launched Operation Common Sense, a comprehensive effort to review, simplify and recodify regulations. Last week, in a further effort to bring a number of widely scattered programs under one roof, Carter proposed the establishment of a new Department of Education.

Whether that will ease--or aggravate--critics' concerns about Government intrusion, though, remains to be seen. Last week, a panel of 69 distinguished businessmen and educators--including former Education Commissioner Harold Howe, Urban League Executive Director Vernon Jordan, Rockefeller Foundation President John Knowles and World Bank President Robert McNamara--issued a statement on the subject. "There is a risk that the academic freedom of our colleges and universities will one day be compromised by the unrestrained growth of the influence of Government," they warned. What will follow their manifesto remains uncertain, but educators are in a fighting mood. "We're going to have to be tough-minded," says Hopkins' Muller. "We can't count on the Government to be benevolent. We have to be assertive."

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