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Is a 15-week limit on abortion an acceptable compromise?
A recent opinion piece by George F. Will, “Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice” in the Washington Post made the startling claim that the overturning of Roe v. Wade (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 2022) has resulted in “a partial healing of the nation’s civic culture.” One might think exactly the reverse. The Dobbs decision energized voters, especially women and young people, resulting in numerous Republican electoral defeats across the country. However, Will argues that the return of abortion policy to the states gives voters the opportunity of choosing moderate restrictions on abortion. Since most Americans support early abortion while opposing late-gestation abortion, Will thinks that a 15-week ban on abortion would be an acceptable compromise.
Why 15 weeks? Two reasons can be given. Almost all abortions in the US—93%—occur within the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. For this reason, making abortion illegal after 15 weeks would not, it would seem, impose serious burdens on most people seeking abortions.
Another reason is that several European countries limit abortion on request to the first trimester, leading some US lawmakers to suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with theirs. This is disingenuous, to say the least. While elective abortion is limited in some European countries, it is not banned afterwards, but is allowed on other grounds, including economic or social reasons, or a threat to the woman’s physical or mental health. Moreover, in most European countries, patients do not have to pay for abortion; it is covered under universal health coverage. The fact is that the trend in Europe has not been to limit abortion, but to expand access to it. Countries in Europe “… have removed bans, increased abortion’s legality and taken steps to ensure laws and policies on abortion are guided by public health evidence and clinical best practices.”
Were states to guarantee access to abortion prior to 15 weeks, a 15-week ban might be acceptable. However, even before Dobbs, many women in the US lacked access to abortion, due to a dearth of providers, especially in rural areas. They often had to travel many miles to find an abortion clinic, which meant that they had to arrange childcare if they have other children or take time off work. Delay is also caused by the need to raise money for an abortion, which is not paid for by Medicaid in most states, except in cases of rape, incest, or a life-threatening condition. To be sure, even if there were none of these roadblocks, some women would still not be able to have early abortions because they do not know that they are pregnant, due to youth, being menopausal, chronic obesity, or a lack of pregnancy symptoms. Any time limits will pose hardships for some people. But if access to early abortions were guaranteed, a compromise on a 15-week limit might be worth it.
I suspect that time-limit advocates are not particularly interested in making sure that women who have abortions get them early in pregnancy. They want to place roadblocks in the way of getting abortions, full stop. That these roadblocks increase the numbers of late abortions is of little concern to them, however much they wring their hands over late abortions. Abortion can be reduced by reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies, something that has been shown to be achieved by access to contraceptives and science-based sex education in the schools. Remember when pro-lifers emphasized those methods? Me neither.
“Some US lawmakers suggest that a 15-week ban would bring our abortion law in line with European countries. This is disingenuous, to say the least.”
My second concern is with abortions sought after 15 weeks. The reason for a late abortion may be that the woman has a medical condition that has not developed, or has not been detected, until later in pregnancy. In such cases, the pregnancy is almost always a wanted pregnancy, and the decision to terminate imposes a tragic choice.
It may be responded that all states allow abortions to be performed when this is necessary to save the pregnant woman’s life, and many allow for abortions to protect her from a serious health risk. The problem is that these exceptions conflict with standard medical care, especially in the case of miscarriage. Once the woman has begun to miscarry, the failure to remove the fetus is likely to cause her sepsis, which can be life-threatening. However, in states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors cannot perform an immediate abortion, which is the standard of care in such situations. They have to wait until her death is imminent and, in some states, they cannot remove the fetus until its heart stops.
Ireland’s restrictive abortion law was repealed after a woman who was denied an abortion during a miscarriage died from septicemia. To the best of my knowledge, no woman in the US has died as a result of restrictive abortion laws, but some have come close. An OB-GYN in San Antonio had to wait until the fetal heartbeat stopped to treat a miscarrying patient who developed a dangerous womb infection. The delay caused complications which required her to have surgery, lose multiple liters of blood, and be put on a breathing machine. Texas law essentially requires doctors to commit malpractice.
Conservatives often portray those in the pro-choice camp as advocating abortion until the day of delivery, for trivial reasons. This is deeply unfair. If they want us to compromise on time limits, they should be willing to guarantee access to abortion before 15 weeks. They should be willing to compromise on pregnancy prevention through contraception and sex education. And they should agree to drop all restrictions on late-term abortions that make legislators, rather than doctors, in charge of deciding what is appropriate medical care for their patients.
Featured image: Gayatri Malhotra via Unsplash (public domain)
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose hero is Robert Kennedy, wants to build a multiracial progressive coalition.
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There’s been a lot of grumpy commentary about this recent NYT op-ed by Adam S. Hoffman, a Princeton senior claiming that conservatives are being driven off campus. Its basic claims:
In the not-so-distant past, the Typical College Republican idolized Ronald Reagan, fretted about the national debt and read Edmund Burke. Political sophistication, to that person, implied belief in the status quo. … Today’s campus conservatives embrace a less moderate, complacent and institutional approach to politics. … many tend toward scorched-earth politics. But these changes aren’t solely the consequence of a fractured national politics.They’re also the result of puritanically progressive campuses that alienate conservative students from their liberal peers and college as a whole.
The story of this transformation, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starts around 2014, when Gen Z arrived on campus. The new progressive students were less tolerant of heterodox ideas and individuals. …For those on the right, the experience is alienating. … And those who challenge liberal pieties can face real repercussions.
There is actual serious social science research that Amy Binder and her colleagues have done on this exact question. She and her colleagues come to very different conclusions than Hoffman.
I first came across Binder1 through her book with Kate Wood, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. That book came out back in 2013. It agrees with Hoffman on one important thing. There has been a shift in campus conservative activism, from “conservative campus organizations and actors [that] favor a more erudite style of political discussion” to ones “which are often very well funded” and “thrive on confrontation.” The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which focused on “seminars on moral and political philosophy” has found itself being outmaneuvered by more confrontational groups such as Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute (associated with the recently disgraced James O’Keefe) and Turning Point USA.
However, as the book’s publication date suggests, this shift began to take hold years before the Great Awokening. And Binder and Wood provided persuasive evidence that the shift had far less to do with what was happening on college campuses than changes in the broader conservative movement. There was money – and lots of it – for organizations that were willing to take the culture war to America’s universities, creating an entire political economy.
The later consequences are described in The Channels of Student Activism, a more recent academic book, published by Binder and Jeff Kidder last year. While Binder and Kidder are sympathetic to Haidt’s broad program of reform, they push back with evidence against his causal argument. People like George Lukianoff and Haidt “point fingers at the supposed shortcomings of Generation Z,” blaming the purported psychological frailty of an entire generation. Binder and Kidder find that the evidence points towards organizations as the key factors of change. Students “are channeled not coddled,” provided with incentives, identities and even entire career paths by political organizations.
Binder and Kidder identify very different organizational political economies for conservative and liberal/left students. Right leaning students are “encouraged by organizations external to their schools to adopt a discourse hostile to the academic enterprise,” “targeting a liberal campus culture, which plays into a larger Republican game plan.”
As they describe it (on the basis of interviews with students and figures within the relevant organizations):
Many outside organizations encourage students on the right to plan events specifically designed to incite outrage among their left-leaning peers. Once outrage is successfully sparked, and progressive students demand that administrators do something in response, the front line of conservative politics shifts to protecting the speech rights of reactionaries and provocateurs.
The reason why so many campus controversies seem to follow the same script is … that they are following the same script. A conservative group invites a figure onto campus who seems guaranteed to provoke outrage, leading to protests, and likely headlines about campus illiberalism. This is not a reaction against purported wokism so much as a means of weaponizing it for the other side’s political purposes. As Binder and Kidder describe it
The answer to why supporting vile speech has become such a ubiquitous part of college-level conservatism is that student-led groups are operating within a larger outside channel of activism. Many national organizations on the right see the First Amendment as a valuable tool for disrupting liberal hegemony in higher education. Ultimately, it is the influence of outside players—such as the Leadership Institute, Turning Point, Young America’s Foundation, PragerU, and Young Americans for Liberty, as well as local donors helping to fund their preferred campus clubs—that make speech uniquely effective in reactionary mobilization. Some of these organizations, like the Leadership Institute and Turning Point, maintain a stable of speakers ready to headline events put on by student-led groups. .
There is also ample help to subsidize the costs of hosting such figures…. Perhaps most importantly, national organizations and wealthy benefactors set the tone for what types of activism are appropriate for club members, and they provide a ready-made and consistent script that right-leaning students use to defend their provocations.
Also, for succcessful agitators, there’s a career in it. Binder and Kidder quote a “faculty advisor to several conservative clubs,” who “explained the multiple components of the strategy, from initially causing a stir to eventually presenting a burnished résumé that looks good in the realm of right-leaning politics.”
Press is always good. You always want that …[the clubs] want to get it on YouTube. … So, you pick speakers that [are] creating something that will be explosive…. There’s a conflict, and [students are] behaving in that field of conflict, and that helps to get press. … You go to your donors and it’s very easy to show them, “We’re on CNN. Give us more money.” …[Students are] also looking down the road … at internships…. These are the [students] that are going to end up in politics. [ . . . ] And they know that by doing these types of events, especially if there’s some visibility [it’s] all the better for them.
Things are very different for liberal/left students. They don’t have anything like the same ecosystem of supportive external groups. Instead, they have a hopelessly underfunded College Democrats program, a bunch of smaller organizations, and, well, PIRGs (Binder and Kidder touch on some of the controversies around PIRGs’ funding model, but they don’t get deeply embroiled). What they do have is the perception that many or most faculty and university officials are sort of on their side, and an infrastructure of intra-college institutions which provide a lot of inclusion policies and rhetoric, and some rather more modest forms of actual support.
Liberal and left students often feel at home on college campuses in ways that conservatives do not. They tend to overestimate the predominance of liberal views among their fellow students, and classroom discussion very often seems to privilege a loosely liberal set of values and concerns. Very often, they focus their political demands on their immediate surroundings. Binder and Kidder find that pressures for increased inclusion may come from a kind of tacit alliance between concerned students and employees in the relevant parts of the university.
The result is that while conservative groups leverage (and sometimes deliberately create) local incidents for national consumption, liberal and left students are more likely to focus internally. They are also likely to find themselves disappointed a lot of the time – especially those on the left. University officials are often happy to pay lip service, create diversity policies, and sometimes provide assistance and support. They are far less likely to be sympathetic to the more sweeping demands for changes to the underlying political economy of the university itself, which would likely upset constituencies they want to keep happy (elected politicians; boards of trustees).
That helps explain why liberal and left leaning students often end up being quite cynical. Nor are there the same kinds of career opportunities for liberal or left wing activists (whether moderate or radical) as there are for conservative bomb throwers. There just aren’t the same kinds of external institutions on the left, offering support, internships and future opportunities.
So if Binder and Kidder are more or less correct (and they have done a lot of interviews), there are three immediate implications about the NYT op-ed.
The first – most obviously – is that it is wrong. The big shift from the bespectacled bowtie model of campus conservatism to the frenzy of Turning Point USA and rampaging groypers wasn’t a reaction to Wokism-Out-of-Control, as Hoffman maintains. It was a product of a national level shift in the organizational political economy on the right, as national conservative groups perceived possible political advantage from stirring stuff up more on campus. This doesn’t mean that outraged reactions from left students aren’t part of the story. It means instead that they feed an independently existing organizational machine that wants them to be outraged, and will go to increasingly extreme lengths to make sure that they are outraged. Quoting Binder and Kidder:
provocations are often very much part of the design … Elliot Kaufman, a former conservative activist from Stanford University, for example, acknowledged in an op-ed for National Review that “The left-wing riots were not the price or the downside of inviting Yiannopoulos—they were the attraction.”
Second – that media events like the NYT op-ed feed the phenomenon that they purport to describe. If your political economy is all about stirring up media attention and reaction to the problem of illiberalism on campus, then getting op-eds into major national newspapers is a win. Commentators have pointed out that Hoffman was involved in the conservative movement long before he wrote the op-ed. He is also more likely to be able to enjoy a career in professional conservatism, if that is what he wants, after having published it. That doesn’t imply that he is insincere in his claims or his politics. As Binder and Kidder make clear, people’s beliefs and their organizational attachments influence each other on the left as well as the right (they find that one one of the problems faced by campus liberalism and left organization is that there aren’t enough careerist opportunities for their rabblerousers). But the op-ed isn’t an explanation of the causal relationship underlying the shift. It is an example of it.
Finally – that there is another political economy that we need to know more about. One of the most intriguing arguments that Binder and Kidder make is that conservatives are pretty well united around a strong pro free-speech position (even if some of them don’t like the provocateurs that get invited on campus), while liberals tend to be conflicted. Binder and Kidder see this as an opportunity for national left-liberal groups to articulate a better understanding that can be propagated to students.
But there is another way of thinking about it. One reason that the model of conservative campus outrage politics works, is that it is easier to use speech issues to split people on the left half of the political spectrum than it is to split people on the right. And much of the art of politics consists in highlighting the issues that will divide your adversaries (it’s an important element of what William Riker dubbed “heresthetics”). The disagreements over free speech rack national political debate as much as politics within colleges – hence the conservative strategy of crossing the streams, to rally their own troops and create disarray in the ranks of their opponents.
That helps explain why national newspapers keep on publishing pieces on this. It gets fights going, and attracts attention. It also helps explain the careers of people like Jonathan Chait (if you are in the attention economy, and the pieces you get most attention for are the pieces that are most likely to divide your readers, then it is not difficult to do the math about how to maintain readership, and it would take an unusually high degree of moral probity to resist the implicit pressure). But the broader implication is that the political economy of conservative student organizations that Binder and Kidder describe aren’t just linked to right wing media, but to the incentive structures of liberal media too. The strategy would be much less successful, if it didn’t play into liberal-versus-left tensions and attention dynamics too.
1 Binder will become a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins’ SNF Agora Institute next year. My interest in her and her colleagues’ findings long pre-dates this, and I haven’t consulted her in writing this (any mistakes, exaggerations or misinterpretations are completely mine).
“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.
At New College of Florida, in Sarasota, Gov. Ron DeSantis removed six of the school’s 13 trustees, replacing them with allies holding strongly conservative views.
In January, demonstrators in Tallahassee protested policies restricting how issues of race are taught in Florida schools, including the decision by the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis to reject a proposed Advanced Placement course in African American studies.
Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, argues that the Justice Department has victimized and attempted to silence conservative parents.
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Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson recently published a book, Can College Level The Playing Field?: Higher Education in an Unequal Society, which I’d recommend to anyone who wants to understand the structural position of higher education in the US. Spoiler alert here: Their answer is “No”. Most of the book is taken up with explaining why, by showing the multiple ways in which background inequalities and inequalities in the pre-college education system constrain any efforts higher education might make to level the playing field, and showing how unequal the higher education system is anyway, including – and this seems not to be well understood by politicians or a lot of commentators – how unequal the public sector itself is.
Full disclosure: I’m close friends with both of the authors, and read at least 3 versions of the manuscript before it was published and, I just realized by looking at its Princeton University Press page, wrote a blurb for it. The producer of the CEE podcast series is putting the finishing touches on an interview that we’ve done with them, and as soon as it is published, I’ll post about it encouraging you to listen and, again, encouraging you to read the book.
This (extremely long) post, though, is only secondarily about the book. My main interest is in a genuinely awful review of it, and of another book by Gary Orfield (which, I will emphasize several times, I have not read yet), in Boston Review by Christopher Newfield. I’m writing about it partly because it so irritated me that I want to get my irritation out of my system, but also partly because it illustrates some of the failings that are common to many of the books and commentaries I read about higher education.
Let’s start with Newfield’s criticism of the final two chapters, which articulate a series of measures that legislators and campus leaders could feasibly adopt to reduce somewhat the role of higher education in reproducing inequality. He accuses them of advocating “tinkering toward utopia”. What we need, he says, is bold, large scale, dynamic reforms of higher education. Unfortunately Baum and McPherson reject the two examples of what he calls “the two most significant educational movements of the last decade”: the movements for student loan cancellation, and free college.
“Tinkering toward utopia” is a nice phrase (not Newfield’s own, as he acknowledges). But it’s an odd way of describing proposals which the authors specifically say will not come anywhere close to achieving anything like utopia (because, as I’ve said, their answer to the question posed in their title is a very firm “No”).
And how would what he calls the “two most significant educational movements in the past decade” lead toward utopia? Frankly, it seems odd to call student debt cancellation an educational movement. It really has nothing to do with education. It’s a simple way of putting $1.7 trillion in the hands of people who went to college, on a one-off basis. It would not increase spending in, or funding of, higher education, and it would not make it more affordable for anybody. It wouldn’t alter the inegalitarian structure of higher education: indeed, full scale debt cancellation would give far more money to graduates who were already recipients of higher public subsidies than to people who were subsidized less (because, being from poorer families they attended less selective colleges, on which the government spent and spends less money. As Baum and McPherson demonstrate in chapter 3, this is true within the public higher education system, as well as between it and some parts of the private system). Indeed: student debt cancellation might actually turn out to be a chimera: Biden seems to have been unable to deliver it, thus possibly paying whatever electoral cost is associated with seeming to favour the better educated without harvesting any of the electoral benefit of actually getting money into their hands. (And: one big argument for student debt forgiveness was that it was a fiscal stimulus measure that the President could enact without Congress: surely if Congress were inclined to act we wouldn’t be asking it to give $1.7 trillion just to people who attended college? Progressives, I assume, would want to get at least a little bit of it into the hands of people with no experience of college)
Free public college would, by contrast, have substantial effects on higher education, not all of which are well understood. But it’s worth mentioning that it, too, would not result in increased spending in, or funding of, higher education. Free public college would, at best, keep total spending on public education constant: families that currently pay tuition would keep the money, which would be replaced by funds from the Federal and/or state governments [1]. Higher income students would receive a much bigger handout than low income students because there are many more of them, they attend public institutions that spend more on them, and they stay in those institutions longer, than low income students. And for most low-income students public college is already tuition-free or nearly so, because most low income students in the public sector either attend lower tuition institutions (which, as the previous sentence implies, and as Baum & McPherson’s book shows not coincidentally, receive less State support per student) or, as in the case of UW-Madison and many other flagships, get a package which eliminates tuition. So what Warren and Sanders proposed was a massive transfer of money to families in the upper third of the income distribution which did very little to address the real college affordability problem for lower income students, which is not tuition and fees but living expenses and the educational resources available to the institutions they attend. (Indeed, the Sanders proposal restricted spending on facilities and administration; whereas one of the serious problems that community colleges, which most lower income students attend, notoriously suffer from is a lack of administrative staff, especially counselors, and on other campuses space is a serious issue).[2][2.5]
The most peculiar part of Newfield’s review is the following passage (warning: it’s long):
Equality of opportunity has been a mainstream policy goal for years now, and it is the ethical horizon of these two arguments—the “level playing field” of Baum and McPherson’s title. But a different mainstream operated in the mid-1960s, one that saw equal opportunity as the means to the end of equal outcomes. That goal appeared in a famous commencement address Lyndon Johnson delivered at Howard University in 1965:
Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.
But freedom is not enough. . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “You are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. And this is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights.
We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact, and equality as a result.
Johnson defined equal opportunity as the gateway to equal results. This could not mean that every individual would end up with equal resources, but it did mean that equal outcomes should hold across racial groups. On average, Black students would graduate from high school at roughly the same rates as whites, go on to university at the same rates, get bachelors’ degrees at the same rates, and so on. (The same would be true of indigenous and Latino students—indeed students from any racial group.) With visible and structural inequalities truly undone, Blacks as a group would come to earn, on average, the same as whites in employment after college, and their family wealth would soon become comparable (rather than get stuck at 15 percent of white wealth, where it has lingered for years). A similar line of thought lay behind the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution: women should earn the same as men. On this conception, justice entails not the right to compete to be equal—as had been done for centuries—but being equal in fact.
If a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally.
Johnson said the quiet part out loud—the part that Baum, McPherson, and Orfield cannot bring themselves to say even today. The argument of his Howard speech is the only coherent theory of civil rights: if no racial group is innately inferior to another and opportunity is genuinely equally distributed, then we should expect to see equal outcomes across groups. The upshot is that if a social system is producing unequal group outcomes, the only reasonable conclusion is that opportunities are not distributed equally. This is what Johnson was saying.
Again, I have not read Orfield’s book (though I have read enough of Orfield’s work to find it spectacularly surprising that he suddenly can’t bring himself to say out loud something he’s been saying for decades. Whatever). Baum and McPherson are unequivocal in their assertion of what Newfield says they cannot bring themselves to say even today. The title of their book is Can College Level the Playing Field? and, as I said earlier, their answer to that question is “No”. It’s actually more elaborate — something like this: “No way. You would have to ignore all the available evidence to think that the answer is “yes”. Much of our book is taken up with providing you with the available evidence. Opportunities are so utterly unequal from conception to age 18, and educational interventions so much less efficient year on year as children age that it is utterly impossible to think that college could level the playing field, and you would have to be completely deluded to think otherwise”.
Well, they are politer than that, perhaps because they are politer than me. But the answer is reflected on every single page of the book. They have a view that John Quiggin has occasionally articulated here at CT, and that, of course, Rawls shares and that Quiggin, Rawls, Baum and McPherson all believe because it is true – that if you want equal opportunities, you need to massively restrict and maybe even eliminate inequality of outcome, because unequal outcomes in one generation produce unequal opportunity in the next. It’s quite impressive to read more than 4 pages of their book without picking this up; to have read the whole thing and think that they are unwilling to say it is a spectacular achievement.[3] Later he says “Both books stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion: that American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. (Yet again, although this conclusion has been a central theme of Orfield’s work over many years, I don’t know, just perhaps he has made a volte face and has suddenly decided to stop saying it). But the main message of Baum and McPherson’s book is exactly this: “American education is trapped in an inequality machine”. They don’t, it is true, do any hifalutin’ theorizing or call it “racial capitalism”, or appeal to Foucault, or whatever, but they document the way that the inequality machine traps American education on every page.
Newfield seems to really dislike that Baum and McPherson understand what it means for higher education to be trapped in an inequality machine.
Baum and McPherson call for better pathways to degree completion, better advising, and more auditing of colleges to improve “accountability.” We’ve long been doing the last of these, to little effect, and the authors give no reason why their other prescriptions will do much better.Baum and McPherson do say we need to focus on “reducing the differences in opportunities and outcomes between individuals from low-income backgrounds and those with more resources.” Yes—but that’s where the book should start, not where it should end! They add, “There is persuasive evidence that spending more on the education” of students at community colleges and other broad-access institutions “pays off in higher graduation rates.” Yes! So let’s spend more—a lot more! “Inadequate funding of broad-access colleges is a major national problem.” Yes! So let’s actually fund the reduction of racialized outcomes gaps!
Actually Baum and McPherson do want us to spend more. A lot more. But, oddly for people who are supposed not to understand that higher education is trapped in an inequality machine, they want to spend that money on reducing (maybe even eliminating) poverty. They want to reduce the racialized outcome gaps not by spending $60 billion/year mainly on wealthy and white students in higher education but by spending it on pre-school and elementary schools that all black children attend and which are, they think (maybe Newfield disagrees) currently under resourced. (Perhaps their hunch is that spending money on educating black and poor children is more likely to benefit them than spending that same money on white and more affluent young adults. Just a hunch, but maybe not a crazy one). They prioritize improving universal education (especially early years education, where the money will have more effect) over selective education. The reason they are skeptical of debt forgiveness and free public college is that those programs direct money almost entirely into the upper 30% of the income distribution (if you don’t believe this, go ahead, carry on not believing it, but you won’t be able to not believe it if you read their book) and they think that government spending would be better directed at getting us out of, rather than, as Newfield seems to prefer, entrenching, the inequality machine.
Even if you’re going to restrict new education-related spending to giving families involved in higher education money (as Newfield’s headline programs would), Baum and McPherson point out that point out that the $1.7 trillion Newfield recommends for debt relief, most of which would go to higher income earners, would enable us to double the size of the Pell Grant program for 25 years, so that it would cover not just tuition, but for many low-income students, most living costs. Add in the $60 billion/year that free public college would cost (and disqualify for-profits from receiving it) and you have something that, unlike debt forgiveness and free public college, would likely have a massive positive impact on college success for low and lower middle income students.
In reality, the portrait of inequality so scrupulously depicted in these books implies a conclusion their authors effectively recoil from: that we must massively rebuild a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Nope. (Yet yet again, maybe Orfield has had a late life conversion and does recoil from that. I’ll read his book and find out. Or maybe someone can ask him). But Baum and McPherson advocate precisely that we must massively build (I take Newfield’s ‘rebuild’ comment to be a rhetorical bit of golden ageism) a full range of social systems on truly egalitarian grounds.
Ok, here’s a revealing passage:
Both books focus on increasing limited kinds of procedural fairness, clouding the egalitarian vision animating the overall struggle. The result—like so much cognitive dissonance in a mind divided against itself—makes for painful reading. “I’m not a neoliberal,” the ego insists, but the superego plainly is.
The book I’m talking about does not focus on procedural fairness (though it does, as I’ve said, point out that if you did want to achieve that kind of procedural fairness you’d have to pursue an extremely egalitarian social policy agenda). But it does try to understand the constraints under which higher education operates in our, highly inegalitarian, society, and attempts to give guidance to agents operating under those constraints. It’s possible that Newfield mistakes an understanding and description of the state of the world for an endorsement of that state. But description is not endorsement. When Marx said that philosophers had hitherto only sought to understand the world and the point is to change it he did not mean that it was a mistake to understand it. If you want to change it you need to understand it, and that’s what Baum & McPherson (and much of Orfield’s previous work) does. I don’t know how to use Freudian terms, so I won’t, but Baum and McPherson are not neoliberals: they just understand that the agents they are addressing live in a world shaped by neoliberalism, and don’t have the power, right now and within the time horizons they are concerned with, substantially to shape it.
I haven’t quite finished venting. Here’s the final annoying passage I want to talk about.[4]
Over the last several decades, public universities have accepted state cuts in large part because it was harder to fight the statehouse than to raise tuition on students. In 1995 states on average allocated $8,922 per “full-time equivalent student.” In 2020 that figure was $8,636, below the 1995 level adjusted for inflation. Public college students spent much of the 2010s getting allocations that were 10–20 percent below those of 1995. The federal government accepted a dramatic drop in the relative value of its main grant, the Pell grant, and a shift of financial aid from grants to loans. It let a good chunk of the federal loan system be siphoned off by for-profit colleges, leading disproportionate shares of students of color toward the worst graduation rates, highest debt loads, and highest default rates in known higher education history.
So, there’s some truth here, and some falsehood. Straightforwardly false: its not true that the Pell grant has diminished in value since 1995. Indeed it was declining in value in real terms for over a decade till 1995, since which it has climbed in value, and the program itself has grown hugely (because more and more low-income students are attending college). It is true that States are now spending less per student on higher education, despite spending more total dollars in real terms, and in many cases a larger proportion of their budgets, on higher education. But this is somewhat misleading. Federal government spending on grant aid and tax benefits for higher education has grown dramatically in that period, offsetting the reductions in state aid/student. Of course, different students benefit from Federal aid than from the direct subsidies to institutions that States provide. Those go to all students who attend (more for the more affluent students who attend the better subsidized more selective public institutions, less for the less affluent students who attend the less and non-selective public institutions, sure, but still, everyone shares in the aid). Pell grants go to low-income students, veterans benefits (which grew dramatically after 2003 for some reason) go to… veterans, and tax advantages go to more affluent students.[5] The recipients are different, but the public is paying.
One thing that’s unambiguously right in the passage is that a non-trivial proportion of Federal loans – and, actually, of Federal grant aid – ends up in the hands of for-profit colleges. Dare I imagine that there is a reason why the two so-called “two most significant educational reform movements” of the last decade have been attempts to distribute resources to people who have graduated college, or have attended college or who are attending public colleges, rather than focusing on regulating or improving or eviscerating for-profits that prey on low-income and non-white students. Maybe it’s an entirely innocent reason – it’s not sexy. But it would be really easy for individual States, if they wanted, to regulate for-profits or, preferably, steer Federal resources away from for-profits and get those resources diverted to public and non-profit colleges. Any State could establish a Pell-top up grant and a Veteran’s Benefit top-up grant of, say, $3k-5k/year for which for-profits would be ineligible, and immediately low-income students would flock out of for-profits, mainly to public institutions, bringing their Pell and Veteran’s Benefit grants with them. Any state where the Democrats hold all branches of government, and perhaps even some where they don’t control the State Supreme Court, could do this, and a few do. But plenty of others could.
Baum and McPherson advocate increases in federal and state grant aid, and better accountability for both for profits and non-profit and public institutions. If Newfield, or Warren or Sanders, want to start an educational movement that would be genuinely egalitarian, they could start by reading Baum and McPherson’s book, where they’d get a lot of help. Which, I strongly recommend, you should do too!
[1] I say at best because I think there are reasonable fears that it would, over time, reduce the level of resources available to public colleges and universities. Two fears I have (that I don’t think Baum and McPherson mention, but I might be wrong). One is: what happens when Republicans control all 4 branches of government? In Wisconsin when Republicans have held the reins of power they have used them to limit state funding of higher education, and have frozen in-state tuition rates. Do we really think that Republicans would act differently at the national level? For that matter, how confident are we that Democrats would? And second, if you suspect, as I do, that would result in an erosion of available resources, do you really think that affluent families will keep spending $30-50k/yr in tuition sending their children to degraded public flagships in other states rather than to financially healthier private schools which will spend the tuition revenues on their children rather than using them to cross-subsidize low-income students and state residents?
[2] How is space an issue? Many more selective public schools have better equipped and less crowded classrooms, more relaxing spaces within which instructors and students might mingle, and less pressure on classroom use, allowing, for example, for students and instructors to chat before or after class, than do many of the regional comprehensives in their systems. They also have more scope for scheduling classes to optimize use of building space, because a higher proportion of their students have flexible schedules being younger, from more affluent families, and residing on campus. Even on flagships: on my campus Kinesiology, a large and one of the fastest growing majors, is stuck in the basement of a terrible building replete with classrooms designed for bad science teaching in the 50’s.
[2.5] I did some investigation that suggested that for both Warren and Sanders what you saw was what you got: literally everything in each of their plans was on their website, suggesting that quite limited thought had gone into them.
[3] I believe Newfield read the book because he has quotes from several parts of it. My first book was reviewed by two different reviewers who I am sure did not read it, one because he criticizes the book for making an argument for exactly the opposite conclusion that it in fact argued for, and the other because the entire review was focused on one of the blurbs, which I didn’t write.
[4] That’s a complete lie. I want to talk about several more annoying passages. For example, this silliness pissed me off: “this cautionary moral is more likely to function as an alibi for the status quo than to inspire action capable of meeting the structural challenge”. But, really, you get the idea.
[5] Federal aid typically comes in voucher form, so it shows up as tuition revenue, whereas state aid typically goes directly to institutions. So if all government funding were in the form of vouchers tuition would look high, even though families would only actually be spending the same amount as if all government funding were direct-to-institution and tuition looked low.
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