I thank Mal Kline, executive director of Accuracy in Academia, for alerting me to the rare and important testimony about the massive intrusion of the federal government in academe by Ron Lipsman, writing in The American Thinker.
Lipsman, a math professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, notes the extent to which the feds are now calling the shots:
We have reached the point where for many institutions of higher education, the amount of revenue that they derive from either of their two traditional source — tuition and either state funds (public institutions) or endowments (private institutions) — is eclipsed by the funds secured [lawfully, with the public’s support] from the feds through government grants and research contracts . . . Much of this has been accomplished without any special enabling legislation. It takes place within the budgets of various federal departments and agencies — e.g., Defense, Commerce, Interior, NASA, NSF, and others.
Relating how the chase of federal dollars drives decision-making on his own campus, Lipsman says:
The selection of campus capital projects and facilities maintenance programs is determined to a surprising extent by the university’s perception of their likelihood of attracting federal matching monies.”
It is primarily only sexy new buildings and research labs that can do so.
The basic infrastructure is left to decay . . . It has been estimated that the deferred maintenance costs at my institution are nearing one billion dollars.
While the safety indicators and educational environment in our classrooms and office buildings atrophy, we leverage funds from the feds to build fancy new buildings whose need is questionable.
Lipsman ties the frenetic pursuit of federal money to the entrenchment of bias on campuses:
So . . . the university’s infrastructure decays while we chase federal dollars for glitzy buildings, climate change projects, diversity programs, and other wasteful outlays in order to satisfy Uncle Sam’s dubious priorities.
Don’t miss the rest of Lipsman’s plucky declaration, from which one must conclude that federal funds and control have much to do with the teetering of the ivory tower.