Federal Support for University Research: Forty Years After the National Defense Education Act (Conference: October 1, 1998)
Remarks by Robert M. Rosenzweig
The National Defense Education Act was born out of what the Act, itself, described as "the present education emergency." It was, however, as much a political as an educational emergency. The true impetus for NDEA was that annoying beep emitted by Russia's Sputnik as it orbited the earth. Every beep was a reminder that our adversaries had gotten there first and, by inference, that those responsible for the American part of the race had failed to get out of the starting block.
The correct explanation for the failure was that our space program had been botched by the military, which was responsible for it, and by political leaders, who had failed in their responsibilities for both policy and oversight.
Two things conspired to divert the blame from those who deserved it onto the American educational system. The first was the eternal political search for something or someone to carry the can other than those who are genuinely responsible. The second was that those who were, for quite other reasons, concerned about the condition of the educational system leaped at the opportunity to use their new-found notoriety as an argument for long-desired funding.
Prior to Sputnik, the federal government had no educational policy worthy of the name. Post-war support of scientific research was focused on universities and included funding for research facilities and graduate fellowships in the sciences. The government had little interest in higher education outside of the research universities and Land Grant colleges, and its interest in research universities was limited to the handful that were major research performers.
The only significant. K-12 programs brought money to schools in so-called "federally impacted areas" and to programs of vocational education so encrusted in an ancient bureaucracy that signs of intelligent life were often hard to detect.
Against that background NDEA was something of a miracle--a small miracle, but a miracle nonetheless. It was much less than the advocates of aid to education wanted. David Henry, for example, president of the University of Illinois reacted to the passage of NDEA by saying, "In the absence of a plan and in the confusion over what ought to be done, Congress has taken both limited and disappointing action." But if it was disappointing to liberals who wanted more, it was equally troublesome to conservatives. The leading Senate conservative, Senator Robert Taft was never reconciled to this federal intrusion into an area that he believed the Founders had never contemplated.
NDEA was unique for the range of programs it encompassed. First, though, a word about what was not included. There was no program for classroom construction either in K-12 or in higher education. That was more than conservative forces would accept and omitting it finessed the church-state issue which had long been an obstacle to federal education programs. There were also no scholarships in the Act. This was not to be an extension of the G.I. Bill to civilians. It is interesting to note, though, that Title I of the Act says, "We must increase our efforts to identify and educate more of the talent of the Nation. This requires programs that will give assurance that no student of ability will be denied an opportunity for higher education because of financial need." The Act, of course, did no such thing. The closest it came was to authorize a small student loan program. But the words of Title I foreshadow serious steps toward that goal that followed in succeeding decades.
In addition to the Student Loan Program, NDEA included a program of support for the training of school guidance counsellors, support of research and training in uncommonly taught languages and area studies, summer and full year institutes for school language teachers, and a graduate fellowship program. It is to that last program that I now want to turn.
NDEA Title IV, the graduate fellowship program, was designed to alleviate an expected shortage of college teachers. Since the Ph.D. was then (and now) the accepted credential for that job, Title IV set out to increase the supply by requiring universities to expand their Ph.D. programs in order to receive fellowship aid. Also, in part as a reaction to the clustering of NSF fellowships in a small number of universities, the Act required attention to a wide geographic distribution of awards. NSF, by the way, caught that message, and began its Cooperative Graduate Fellowship Program in which awards were made to institutions rather than directly to individuals, and in which geographic distribution was an explicit goal.
For a small program--it began with the award of 500 fellowships --Title IV bore a heavy burden of issues. First was the mandate of geographic distribution. One applicant university saw the opportunity there and described itself as sitting in the center of a hundred mile-wide vacuum of graduate education. Clearly, the strength of the institution was not in physics. Second, it took some fancy footwork to get around the active concern for what would happen if the matter of aid to religion were raised. The original proposal from the Eisenhower administration would have made grants to universities which would have been matched and used to begin or expand Ph.D. programs. Universities would have been authorized to use the money for any purpose toward that end, not just for fellowships.
It was the program that university administrators dream of on a good night. It never got out of committee in either the House or the Senate because it was clearly viewed as aid to institutions, including religious institutions. In the end, the Act authorized grants for fellowships, each of which was accompanied by a cost of education allowance which could be used as each institution chose.
This sensitivity for the First Amendment seems almost quaint today, but it was real. The issue arose again because some early awards were made to graduate programs of religious studies. So alarmed were some in Congress that the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare proposed in 1961 that the Act be amended to read, "No fellowship shall be awarded to any individual under this title for study at a school or department of divinity or religion, or awarded to an individual for study in religious or theological subjects." The language was not adopted in legislation, but the message was clear to those who administered the program.
Another feature of the Title IV program was its breadth of coverage. There were no fields excluded from the competition. That was not without its problems. Several years into the program, Albert Thomas, a powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee was upset because the University of Houston had not fared as well as it had hoped to. Mr. Thomas took note of some awards that had been made in the field of folklore, and pointedly wondered what that might have to do with the national defense. While a substantive answer might have been crafted to that question, a more direct answer was found in the form of some successful applications from Mr. Thomas's favorite university.
It is clear in retrospect as, indeed, it was at the time, that the scale of NDEA was far too small to have any significant impact on American higher education. But that is not to say that it was inconsequential. On the contrary, as a first small and halting step toward to involvement of the federal government into higher education other than in the sciences, it was of considerable importance. The student loan program was an important step toward the next decade's commitment to broad educational access financed by government grants and loans. And the graduate fellowship program was the platform on which the huge fellowship programs of the Higher Education Act were built. To give credit where it is due then, it is fair to say that those conservatives who saw NDEA as the camel's nose under the tent, knew a camel when they saw one. Although camels are said to be difficult animals to manage, I think this one has been worth the trouble.
© 2006 UC Regents
Last modified: 15 April 2006 | e-mail