Populism and partisanship in the recent history of state higher education reform

• In Event: Higher Education Policy Influencers: The Impact of National, State, and Third-Sector Agendas on Postsecondary Education

Abstract

State legislatures are among the most important actors in the organizational field of higher education. The Tenth Amendment situates state governments as the major determinant of the governance and finance of public higher education in the US. For most of the 20th century, policymaking at the state level focused on access, affordability, and accountability in higher education and primarily concerned money (Heller, 2001). Access and affordability, for example, are impossible to disentangle, as college costs and the availability of financial aid are crucial in determining who attends college and where (Page & Scott-Clayton, 2016). Similarly, the history of accountability policy has primarily entailed economic and technocratic debates on annual appropriations and limiting changes in tuition and fees; they are implicitly tied to race and White privilege (Kelchen, 2018; Taylor et al., 2020)).
Over the past 25 years, however, the rhetoric and substance of state government policymaking has transformed. Conservative legislatures in particular have turned higher education into a new battleground for partisan debates over fundamental American values related to speech, guns, sex, citizenship, and race. To varying degrees, such legislative initiatives represent solutions in search of a problem. State legislatures have passed legislation allowing concealed weapons on college campuses and recasting campus sexual assault as an issue of due process. These debates are no longer about the appropriate role of government in the production and transmission of knowledge, they are defined by partisanship and populism.
This paper considers this shift in state higher education policymaking, its origins, contours, and implications. Two related explanations are considered. One argument focuses on the notion of capture, that such initiatives are a response to progressive control of higher education as an institution. A related argument suggests that such dynamics may be due to gridlock in national politics over the past generation, making state governments the central battleground in American public policymaking (Grumbach, 2022). The paper presents novel descriptive data from a nationwide survey characterizing legislators' views of problems and policies related to speech, guns, sex, citizenship, race, and religious freedom on college campuses. The paper concludes with implications for higher education and policy.

Author

• David R. Johnson, Georgia State University