Centralizaton and its consequences

 Back in 1960, during the first presidential election that I could really follow closely, I saw candidate Richard Nixon interviewed on Face the Nation or Meet the Press.  He was asked about federal aid to education, a major campaign issue, fueled both by the competition with the USSR and the failure of school capacity to keep up with the baby boom, resulting in double sessions in many parts of the country.  Democrats favored federal aid both for school construction and to pay higher teachers' salaries.  Republicans opposed at least the latter step, arguing that federal aid would  lead to federal control.  One of the interviewers, as I remember, asked Nixon why it would necessarily lead to federal control.  He replied that "if you look at the history" of such programs, that was what you would find.  I think I asked my father--an exact contemporary of Nixon's--whether that was true, and he assured me that it was not.

It turns out that Nixon was right.

President Kennedy couldn't pass an aid to education bill in his term, because a Catholic Democrat from New York on the House Rules Committee refused to accept it if it didn't include aid for parochial schools.  Lyndon Johnson did pass such a bill in 1965, the year of the Great Society.  It included a provision allowing the government to withhold aid from any district that practiced racial segregation.  Federal spending on both K-12 and higher education has grown enormously in subsequent decades, reaching $174.9 billion on higher education and about $110 billion on K-12.  A great deal of the $174.9 billion that goes to higher ed apparently goes to a relatively small number of research universities, which cannot survive without it in their current form.  The federal government also finances student loans, which reached $83 billion in the last fiscal year, and keep higher education alive.  

Before turning to the impact of the Trump administration, I want to suggest that these funds have appear to have made both K-12 and higher education in this country worse, not better.  Even in 1965, when I entered college and the great society began, faculty at elite universities were taught to value research over teaching, and that trend has gotten much worse since research can bring in large amounts of money. I taught at Carnegie Mellon, where the administration taught faculty that grant proposals were the most important part of their job, in the 1980s, and I saw how the availability of federal research funds corrupted the institution.  Federal money--much of which goes for overhead, meaning that it can in effect be spent on anything--allowed faculties to expand and specialize, while administrations grew exponentially, to the point where they now outnumber faculty members at major institutions.  Almost every college and university in the nation has given up the idea of offering a distinct educational product.   A recent article by an undergraduate at Harvard in the Crimson reveals that the General Education program--the centerpiece of a Harvard education in my time--totally lacks the kind of fundamental course that dominated it sixty  years ago. Grade inflation has made performance in class almost irrelevant.  On the K-12 front, the bipartisan experiment that began under the Bush II administration, No Child Left Behind, has failed.  Test scores in basic skills have been falling in all demographic groups--a trend worsened (but not started) by the disastrous decision to close schools during the pandemic.  Meanwhile, as I believe I have pointed out before, the evidence that more money will improve public K-12 education is dubious.  Here in Massachusetts the Cambridge and Boston school systems--two of the largest and poorest--spend far more money per pupil than many of the wealthy suburbs, yet do worse on test performance.  I have not had the time to research other parts of the country.

The Trump administration regards the K-12 and higher ed educational systems as strongholds of leftist ideology--and it is far from wrong.  It wants to punish them by denying them funds, with potentially devastating effects.  To cite one well-publicized example, Columbia University has about $1.3 billion in federal grants and contracts annually, about 20 percent of its total $6.6 billion budget.  The loss of that money would put an end to Columbia as it now exists.  The same is true, almost certainly, of Harvard.  In the 1960s the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, as it then was, withheld federal funds from some southern school districts to force them to desegregate.  Now the Trump administration is apparently gong to withhold funds to force them to drop DEI programs, deal differently with demonstrations, and even change their curriculums.

How can these institutions respond to a loss of all these funds?

Those of us who have felt for a long time that American education was on the wrong track can fairly view this as an opportunity.  Harvard and Columbia and other similar institutions,. public and private, could do themselves a great favor by laying off more than half of their administrative staff.  DEI offices are only one part of this problem and by no means the biggest one.  Harvard now has ten vice presidents.  Their titles and salaries are Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development ($884,000), Vice President and General Counsel ($740,917), Vice President and Chief Information Officer ($554,000), Vice President for Human Resources ($497,000), Vice President and Secretary of the University ($498,000), Vice President for the Harvard Library ($415,000--the only vice president concerned in any way with academic affairs), Executive Vice President ($625,000), Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications ($543,000), Vice President for Campus Services ($287,000), and Vice President for Finance ($680,000).  None of those positions existed 60 years ago, when I and my classmates began our far superior undergraduate education.  All of them presumably have staffs.  Harvard also has more varsity teams competing in  NCAA sports--about 45--than any other college in the country, and clearly spends much more money on athletics than it used to.  These are areas--along with research--that could be cut.  The faculty could once again be required to spend more time teaching and the humanities and social science faculty could be required to teach broader, more general courses of the kind that set the tone of the university in decades past.  That would be the hardest change to make, however, since generations of faculty have now been taught either that such courses are beneath them or that they served as instruments of white male supremacy.

In K-12 the solution to our problems has been found.  Certain urban charter school networks such as Achievement First, where my son worked for about fifteen years, have shown that uniforms, long hours, discipline, and academic demands upon their pupils can generate astounding results. Some hoped that charter schools would provide models for public education, but instead, school systems and teachers unions have treated them as enemies and fought their expansion.  In my opinion, had either higher education institutions or school systems done their jobs better in recent decades, they would not be in the vulnerable position that they are in now.  

Meanwhile, as Richard Nixon warned in 1960, our educational systems now find themselves at the mercy of the federal government because of its role as a huge source of funds.  Both party establishments cooperated with this situation for a long time, but now the Republicans reject it, and under Trump are determined to do something about it.  Local school systems and colleges and universities--some of whom probably will not survive--will have to rededicate themselves to their educational function and look for ways to fulfill it more effectively.  They need leadership that will make budget cuts where they most need to be made.  I hope such men and women can step forward.

Reason, Bureaucracy, and History

 The eighteenth century has long been called the age of revolution, often without acknowledging that at least two different revolutions were taking place.  That was the great insight of Alexis de Tocqueville, who described the two revolutions separately in two great books, Democracy in America, about the egalitarian society and representative institutions of the newly formed United States, and The Old Regime and the French Revolution, about the growth of a bureaucratic state in France in the 17th and 18th centuries and the failure of the  French Revolution to stop it.  The relationship between democracy and bureaucracy has changed a great deal over the last 250 years, especially in the United States, and it is entering a critical phase now, with potentially enormous consequences of the US and the world.

Some years ago I wrote a series of posts here about Democracy in America after reading it from cover to cover for the first time.  The search box at the top of this page will lead any interested readers to it.  I had read The Old Regime and the French Revolution much earlier, in the spring term of my senior year in college, with tremendous effect.  It emerged clearly from that book that Tocqueville personally preferred aristocracy to democracy, although he knew, as he had written twenty years earlier in Democracy in  America, that aristocracy was doomed and that democracy--by which he meant above all the legal equality of all citizens--was sweeping over the world.  His model of aristocratic rule was Great Britain, his wife's home nation.  The British aristocracy, he argued, had governed its nation in a public spirited manner, paying the lion's share of taxes through the land tax, allowing commoners to file suits against them in court, dominating local government, and cooperating with the lower classes in various ways.  The Old Regime argues repeatedly that the French aristocracy had behaved similarly in the later middle ages--an argument that I do not think many other historians have endorsed--but that things changed under Louis XIV, who began building a more centralized bureaucracy to govern the nation based mainly on his Intendants, the officials who represented him in the provinces. The French Revolution had tried to institute a democracy based in part on the new US model, but the nation had collapsed into near anarchy within a few years, leading to the dictatorship of Robespierre.  After a confused period in the late 1790s, Napoleon Bonaparte took over and revived the centralization of the Old Regime, with prefects taking the place of royal intendants.  

Tocqueville wrote The Old Regime in the 1850s and noted that the system of centralized administration and prefects had survived for half a century, through several dynastic and regime changes.  It survived all the way into the current Fifth Republic, buttressed by the grandes écoles, the national professional schools that trained young people for it.  Other European nations, led by Prussia and the German Empire that Prussia created in 1871, also had highly developed bureaucracies.    The early American Republic inspired Tocqueville largely because it did not have such a bureaucracy.  Its democratic institutions began at the local level, with New England town meetings, and US citizens constantly formed political associations to pressure their local, state and national officials.  The whole citizenry followed political affairs closely and took part in them.  That, he thought, was what made democracy a living thing.

Things began to change very slowly in the US in the last decades of the nineteenth century.  While the federal bureaucracy remained relatively small, dominated by postal workers and customs inspectors, elected senators and representatives now controlled appointments to it through informal arrangements worked out within the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil War.  The civil service reform movement began to argue for a permanent corps of non-partisan officials who could pass competitive examinations.  The Pendleton Act of 1883 created such a system for a few individuals, and in successive decades more and more of the federal service was brought under it.  In 1921 the Budget Act created a federal budget office, and in 1924 the Rogers Act created the Foreign Service, our first professional diplomatic corps.  The US never developed anything like the French grandes écoles, but an expanding higher educational establishment helped fill the ranks of the new civil service.  As in Germany, France, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the civil service was viewed as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, trying to use science to promote the greater good.  That idea also had roots in Plato's Republic and its dream of a government ruled by philosophers, literally, lovers of knowledge.

The real explosion of US bureaucracy took place, of course, under Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.  The new SEC began regulating Wall Street trading, the NLRB provided a mechanism to settle disputes over union registration, the Department of Agriculture began trying to control crop production, and public works agencies supervised huge projects.  The Federal Security Agency, the ancestor of the Department of Health and Human Services, administered social security.  The Second World War and its aftermath created huge new defense bureaucracies, and new agencies sprung up in the era of the Great Society under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, including the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration.  Most Republicans had opposed the New Deal agencies, but by the time of the Nixon Administration Republican leaders were going with the flow.  Barry Goldwater in 1964 had waged the first all-out presidential campaign against the bureaucratic state, and lost overwhelmingly.  In 1971, however, the then-confidential Powell memorandum by future Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell laid down a countermanifesto, proposing a political offensive against government regulation of free enterprise.  In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president based upon anti-government rhetoric.

Reagan's bark turned out to be worse than his bite,  but something was changing in public opinion.  With the possible exception of Joe Biden, every president since Gerald Ford--including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--has complained and joked about the size of the federal government and tried to cut it back.  The size of the federal work force has been remarkably stable for most of the period since 1970, which means that it has shrunk substantially as a percentage of our population.  Meanwhile, bureaucracies have had a decidedly mixed record in other advanced parts of the world.  The most powerful bureaucracy in the world now appears to belong to the European Union.  It administers and regulates a vast territory but it has aroused a great deal of resentment, leading to Brexit and to the growth of rightwing parties all over the continent.  The Soviet bureaucracy--probably the largest and most intrusive in history--collapsed in 1989 and has not been rebuilt.  China still seems to have a very powerful centralized bureaucracy, even though its economy is largely privatized.  The UN bureaucracy numbers more than 35,000 people around the world. In general, it seems to me that state authorities have been losing effective power and influence to private interests, especially here in the United States.

Over the last thirty years or so a new anti-bureaucratic movement has grown up within the Republican Party, fueled by foundations like the Koch brothers' and ideologues like Grover Norquist and foundations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.  Those interests are now aligned with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and they are mounting an unprecedented attack on the federal bureaucracy, beginning with efforts to eliminate the Agency for International Development and the Department of Education.  They seem likely to reduce the size of our public health bureaucracies and may even try to privatize the post office.  The fate of these efforts will remain somewhat uncertain at least until the Supreme Court rules on various parts of them, but I think they represent a turning point in human affairs.  The Republicans have declared war on the ideal of an educated bureaucracy reordering economic life to promote the common good, and the closely related idea of a national government empowered to keep private economic power within certain limits.  Those ideas date back to the 18th century.  I deeply regret the decline of those ideas, but I also believe that Tocqueville's criticisms of impersonal bureaucracy had a point.  Our public institutions have become unresponsive in many ways, not least because of the influence of private interests exercised through our political system.  Bureaucracies do become devoted to their own self-preservation, if not their own growth.  Our vast state and local educational bureaucracies--probably the ones with the greatest impact on the average citizen--have been doing a very ineffective job for decades and let the nation down badly during  the pandemic.  And bureaucracy and regulations have made it almost impossible for governments of either party to accomplish great things, such as the proposed high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

I doubt very much that the federal government as I have known it all my life will survive this administration.  Even if a Democrat succeeds Trump, they will not have the power to restore it to where it was two months ago, even if they want to.  I cannot possibly predict where this will lead the nation, but I conclude that an important era of modern history is indeed coming to an end.