It’s hard. After the Civil Rights Movement and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Enron and Halliburton and the Teapot Dome scandal, Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln and Millard Fillmore. After Doonesbury cartoons, Independence Day and Legally Blonde 2, the Million Man March, the Million Mom March and a million others. After all the Hollywood glamour and spin, after all the media coverage, after all the hearings and all the protests. After all we hear about is backroom deals and smalltown boys making a difference, it’s hard to believe that Duke would have any place in the Washington world of scandal and intrigue, politics and personal connections.
But Duke does have a place—and it has to. There are bills pending that could change regulations for federal financial aid, meaning some students could lose the ability to afford Duke. There is legislation in the works that would make it a criminal offense for a university to notify a student if federal authorities ask for information about him. There have been proposals to turn college accreditation and curriculum development over to federal regulatory agencies so that universities would have national testing standards like those in place for Kindergarten through 12th grades. Duke, along with its peers in higher education, doesn’t want to see those bills go through. So it has to play the game.
And universities have to be every bit as much of a special interest group as tobacco or oil, even though the lobbyists would hate to have you think so. None of the schools make their cases to Congress alone—Duke may be a big name in Durham, N.C., but in a scene as harried as D.C. politics, you’ve got to be part of a screaming mass to get anything done. Even then, it’s only expert finagling that allows the master advocates to weave their best intentions into the minds and, eventually, agendas of the lawmakers.
Despite the appearance universities often maintain of being perched in an ivory tower or hovering above the fray of politics, daily debates in Washington hit startlingly close to home. The list of agencies and issues that matter is endless: Medicare, Medicaid, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, intellectual property, immigration and visas, the USA Patriot Act. They all affect research and access and academic freedom. In short, anything that could possibly have anything to do with institutional collaboration, health care, travel, security, and obviously, anything with the word “education” in it has some impact on, well, education.
When push comes to shove, what Duke wants isn’t just protection or promises from the Capitol, it wants capital—cold, hard cash to fund high-tech labs, expeditions to ancient lands and students’ tuition. So the University has to pay really close attention to where the money comes from and where it’s going. Federal financial aid and research funding are two of the biggest issues for universities, and even items that seem unrelated to academia can have a profound effect. A slight tweak in Medicaid funding could cost Duke University Health System hundreds of millions of dollars.
Duke isn’t geographically far from D.C. but because voices carry far better in person than over a phone, the University has departments that are responsible for making Duke’s case day in and day out. They’re based in North Carolina, but Nan Nixon and Paul Vick, who head the University and Health System lobbying efforts, make the trip up north at least twice a month.
While Nixon and Vick do the legwork in Washington, their efforts are being coordinated in Durham by John Burness, senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. An old hand at the public affairs game, he’s the man behind the curtain for all government-related dealings at Duke. He doesn’t have George Clooney’s physique or Robert Redford’s chiseled jaw, but he can work a room as well as anybody else at this University—or, for that matter, anybody else in the circles he moves in. He’s a professional schmoozer; a chunk of his job is to hobnob with Trustees at official functions and chat with the mayor when town-gown relations need smoothing over.
The best schmoozing in the world, however, will only get you so far. After that, getting a law on the books often comes down to two things: party loyalty and money. That makes the game even tougher for universities because they can’t give either. Most lobbying blocks can pick a side and then pursue it aggressively, but Higher Education doesn’t have party partiality—and if you’re not aligned with the Democrats or the Republicans, who has any obligation to push for your cause in Congress?
“What is so different about dealing with it now is that partisanship in Washington is so intense,” Burness says of the deep divides that hinder progress in just about every area overseen by Congress—that is to say, every piece of pending federal legislation. “I’ve never seen it as bad as it is now.”
Even if Duke or the umbrella coalitions for higher education could ideologically pick a party, it wouldn’t do much good because the universities can’t just throw money at candidates or campaigns like political action committees can. Colleges simply don’t have it. Money is what makes the world go ’round in Washington, but money is often what Duke is fighting for in the first place. And that’s where the people come in.
Politicians like to talk about “the people.” They like to say that they’re working for the best interests of “the people” and that the money game is a necessary evil if they’re going to get done the things that “the people” want. It might be true—people can be even more convincing than money. After all, money may talk, but it can’t talk back. This is where Burness’ schmoozing kicks in and where the lobbyists have to turn up the volume on every voice they can gather. Those higher education coalitions do have one powerful tool at their disposal: They have a broader grassroots support base than just about any group out there. Not everybody smokes or farms tobacco, not everybody has ties to oil wells or big business, but the number of voters who have gone to college, who are in college right now, who have children in college or who want their children to go to college can carry a lot of weight. The 2000 Census revealed that 26 percent of Americans older than 25 have a bachelor’s degree, and as younger generations are increasingly motivated to go to college, that number is rising.
Although that enormous population can be difficult to mobilize, Burness says it “can occasionally be unleashed”—for example, when financial aid funding is in jeopardy. Lobbyists help devise plans like letter-writing campaigns, orchestrated calls from concerned citizens to their congressmen, sit-down meetings between constituents and representatives and appeals through the media. What could be more compelling for a congressman approaching election season than having every college-educated resident of his district and every relative of a college student or a college graduate who lives in his district clamoring about how important college is and how it’s becoming unaffordable?
But even the promise of votes does not always drive politicians to support the education lobby’s needs. In order for educators to get what they want, they do what they do best: they educate. The lobbyists call in experts from their home institutions; they shove reports and studies and statistics under lawmakers’ noses. And sometimes, they get more creative. One of the programs the Health System runs is Project Medical Education, a two-day dress-up game of “Let’s Pretend” for health policy staffers from the state and federal governments at the beginning of each legislative year.
“We bring the staffers in, and the first thing that happens is they go through a white coat ceremony, the Hippocratic Oath, then medical school, residency, internship and postdoc. All in a day and a half,” says Vick, who coordinates the program. “The attempt is to give them an understanding, through some experience, how medical centers work.”
And if the staffers don’t come away with a perfect understanding of the latest medical research going on at Duke, then maybe they at least come away feeling like Duke thinks they’re special. Sometimes, that relationship can be more important than any health policy expertise because in this game, it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know. Lobbyists’ jobs are to know as many people as possible and to know them well, or at least well enough to figure out what matters to them. That way, the lobbyists know which lawmakers might be sympathetic to their cause—and which ones to avoid.
Vick tells a story about a recent bill supporting stem cell research. Near the end of Senator Jesse Helms’ (R-N.C.) term, stem cell research was a hot-button issue, and Vick and his colleagues knew they needed as much support as they could get. It turned out that the ultra-conservative senator had a child afflicted with a disease that could be affected by research using stem cells, Vick says. That knowledge made it easy to convince him to support the bill.
There are some legislators that you just can’t win over, though, and it’s good to know that too. Vick points to Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.), who was a very successful trial lawyer and made his money suing negligent doctors prior to his political career. Given his background, he has been unsympathetic to the University’s arguments in favor of settlement caps in medical malpractice suits. “It was very clear from the beginning. You knew in the end where he was, based on his own experience,” Vick says. “To his credit, he never turned anyone away who wanted to talk about it.”
Sometimes getting in the door is half the battle. Vick and Nixon spend their days in Washington meeting with legislators to talk over the issues, walking the halls of Congress and regulatory agencies, and generally working to build up contacts and trust for future negotiations. The connections make a world of difference for higher education lobbyists in Washington, where, as Burness says, “the support’s a mile wide and an inch deep.”
Even as universities strive to sell their product as a public good, they resort over and over to the tried-and-true tricks of making connections and manipulating voters. At one time Higher Education was above the daily fray of the Washington world, but now it is part of the array of groups wrangling for lawmakers’ attention. Burness tells of sitting in a room with political analysts in the late 1980s. “They told us, ‘You’ve got to come to grips with the fact that you’ve gone from being seen essentially as a public good to being fat, arrogant, aloof and greedy,’” he says.
Duke is committed to making its arguments, both for the institution and for the greater higher education community. But at the end of the day, what do the lobbyists accomplish?
Financial aid, although it might fluctuate, isn’t going away anytime soon, and the accreditation proposal doesn’t look like it’s going to pass. Legislation about international students’ and researchers’ visas and privacy and information access issues are still on the table, but the lobbyists definitely have the lawmakers’ ears. Duke administrators are already saying it’s easier for international students to secure visas than it was a year ago. Sometimes the accomplishment is as small as changing a “may” to a “shall” or moving a comma in a bill, but sometimes that’s all it takes to get things just right. It’s not a pretty process, but in the ivory tower of higher education, someone’s got to be doing the real-world work.
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