Debate Over Lobbying : Halls of Ivy Research the Pork Barrel

For the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, it is a most unseemly row.

The University of Pennsylvania, diving head first into the world of pork-barrel politics, has broken ranks with some of its brethren and hired a high-powered Washington lobbyist to seek funds from Congress to help build an engineering and chemistry complex on its Philadelphia campus.

For weeks now, presidents of other universities have been phoning Sheldon Hackney, Penn’s president, to make him change his mind. They have “pressed very hard,” Hackney acknowledged, which in the understated language of academia suggests serious pressure indeed.

Convinced of Necessity

So far, Hackney is standing pat. He is convinced that, if Penn keeps ranks with other elite universities that refuse earmarked funds from Congress for scientific buildings, it will never get its $70-million engineering-chemistry facility.

On the surface, Hackney appears to be at the center of an esoteric academic squabble over how academia should do business in Washington. In fact, however, Hackney and his critics are grappling with two of the most difficult issues that have arisen in American education:

--Should government support for science be concentrated narrowly, among those doing the very best work in a particular field? Or should it be spread more broadly and, in the proponents’ view, more democratically, so that smaller and poorer schools can get a share of federal largess?

--Should scientists determine which schools are best equipped to use scarce federal resources? Or should the decisions be left to politicians, who may be less concerned with the national interest than with the parochial concerns of their congressional districts?

Historically, universities have favored letting scientists make the decisions about what buildings should be built with federal aid, even if that meant only the most elite institutions benefitted.

Struggle May Be Lost

But some prestigious universities, including Columbia and Tulane, have broken ranks before. Now Penn’s defection could signal the end of a losing struggle to prevent wholesale lobbying of Congress for funds for scientific buildings.

That would be just fine with John Silber, the president of Boston University and one of the first academics to seek funds for buildings through a Washington lobbyist.

Silber looks on the Penn decision as evidence that the elite universities “have lost the war” after proving themselves “selfish, hypocritical and arrogant in telling Congress not to do what it wants to do.” In Silber’s view, only Congress can break the stranglehold of a few elite universities on scientific research in the United States.

But many of the universities condemned by Silber as elite dismiss funds earmarked by Congress for specific projects as “academic pork barrel” and warn that America’s scientific standing could falter under its weight.

They are especially alarmed by Penn’s decision to retain Gerald Cassidy, the Washington lobbyist who also represents Boston University and other schools, to plead the case for its engineering-chemistry facility. Cassidy’s firm already has managed to win a procession of congressional grants for its clients.

Those who oppose Penn’s decision have visions of academic grants being doled out in the same way as defense contracts, to institutions that happen to be in the districts of key congressional committee chairmen.

The University of California, among others, has refused to seek earmarked funds from Congress, even though it keeps a small staff in Washington to deal with local congressmen and federal education agencies.

Possibility of Change

“But no one wants to be the last bastion of purity in a world gone crazy,” said Paul Sweet, the head of the university’s Washington office. “If everyone is doing it, we will do it too.”

Much may depend on the deliberations of the Assn. of American Universities, an organization of 57 influential institutions, including Penn and its critics, that will begin a three-day annual meeting in Washington on Sunday. The Penn dispute will be high on the agenda.

The federal government once had an extensive program of supporting the construction of scientific buildings on university campuses, but it had died by the early 1970s. So some universities, unable to raise funds any other way, retained Cassidy to approach powerful congressmen for help in building or modernizing scientific buildings.

Some of the congressmen cooperated by including funds for specific scientific facilities in spending legislation. The total of such grants rose from $46 million in 1984 to $225 million in 1988.

To some of the elite universities, this procedure dangerously short-circuited the “peer review” system, the basis for distributing the bulk of federal research grants and, until recently, funds for scientific buildings.

Under peer review, federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation award grants on the basis of recommendations from committees of scientists--the peers of those who are applying for the funds.

Larger Problem Cited

That system, NSF Director Erich Bloch said in a recent speech, “is the only mechanism that offers reasonable assurances that we will spend our money wisely . . . . Shortcuts around merit review are only symptomatic of a larger problem in our society, which is our relentless focus on near-term results rather than on long-term payoffs.”

Boston University’s Silber scoffs at that view. The critics of allowing Congress to earmark the destination of science aid, he says, are merely trying to hang on to a system that rewards them with most of the prizes.

“Those who have the lion’s share of research funds do not want any new boys getting into the old boys’ club,” he said. “It’s an old boys’ club, and new boys need not apply.”

Silber said that Cassidy helped Boston University obtain $19 million from Congress for a science center and $8.5 million for a biology and physics laboratory. Before construction of those facilities, he said, the university had attracted $14 million in federal research grants; since then, it has obtained $110 million.

“Facilities bring in good faculty, who bring in research contracts with peer review,” he said. “It does not matter where you have good facilities; researchers will come. If you put the supercollider project in Timbuktu, all the scientists would be rushing to Africa.” The superconducting supercollider is the $5-billion, high-energy physics facility that the Energy Department has decided to locate in Texas.

Concentration of Funds

Congress’ General Accounting Office, suggesting that the elite universities dominate research grants, has reported that 20 universities, led by Johns Hopkins, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford, received 42% of all the federal funds granted for university research in 1984.

Critics also complain that federal support is concentrated in California and a few other states. California, according to the GAO, received 14% of all research grants that year--more, but not a lot more, than its 11% share of the national population.

For help in Washington, many of the critics of the traditional means of doling out federal aid have turned to the 47-year-old Cassidy, who was the general counsel in the 1970s for the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, whose chairman was Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.).

Cassidy started by helping Jean Mayer, a renowned nutritionist who became president of Tufts University, obtain $17 million from Congress for a veterinary school and a nutrition center in the late 1970s. That launched Cassidy on a lucrative career in an area that no other lobbyist was working, and he says his firm now represents about 100 clients, no more than half of them universities.

The firm insists that it can guide innocent university officials through the maze of Washington.

“I don’t want to belittle the Midwest. I come from Ohio,” said Roy Meyers, Cassidy’s director of information. “But if you came to Washington from a school in Indiana or Ohio or Michigan, you wouldn’t know where to begin. In this office, we have 200 to 300 years’ experience on Capitol Hill.”

Hackney, Penn’s president, seems to agree. “We needed advice,” he said. “We needed help, and we went to a company in Washington that has a good track record. They know the processes how this can be done and whether this can be done. They have much more experience than we have.”

Hackney’s critics fear that Cassidy’s success will encourage more and more universities to join the bandwagon for earmarked funds from Congress. “What really began to change the landscape,” said Robert Rosenzweig, president of the Assn. of American Universities, “was the discovery that this is a lucrative business for lobbyists.”

The critics say that Cassidy engages in political activities that universities would find unseemly. “Schools that would never in a million years think of making a political contribution to a congressman can hire Cassidy and let him do it for them,” said Sweet of the University of California.

According to the records of the Federal Election Commission, which lists only contributions of more than $500, Cassidy averaged $15,852 a year in political contributions from 1985 to 1988, and his wife averaged $11,650 a year during the same period.

In 1987, more than 40 members of the Assn. of American Universities, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, the University of California and Penn, voted to refuse to accept earmarked funds from Congress for scientific buildings.

Instead, they pledged to try to persuade Congress to enact a general program of $500 million a year--without earmarking--for construction and modernization of scientific facilities. In response, Congress agreed last year to authorize a limited program for funding scientific facilities, although it has yet to make any funds available for the program.

But now the 40-university moratorium is starting to unravel. Duke signed a preliminary contract with Cassidy last year but ultimately withdrew. Another association member, the University of Nebraska, quietly signed a contract with Cassidy.

But the real blow came when Penn defected. “It’s like a top general defecting to the Russians,” Sweet said.

Hackney conceded that the moratorium is “preferable public policy. But here we are two years later and we haven’t won the argument with Congress. And my needs are even more pressing.”

If Penn relied solely on individual and corporate contributions, Hackney said, it could expect no more than half of the $70 million needed to build the new engineering and chemical building. “The only way to achieve this is through some sort of federal support,” Hackney said, “and there is no ongoing federal program.”

Hence Penn signed a contract with Cassidy to determine whether it is feasible to seek the needed funds from Congress. Evidently embarrassed by the criticism of that decision, Hackney said: “I’m flattered by the notion that Penn is so important that, if we do something, everyone will follow.”

At the Assn. of American Universities, Rosenzweig is afraid of exactly that.

“They are really the first visible institution to have done this in the last few years,” he said of Penn. “It is a prestigious university. It is Ivy League. It appears to give the practice some legitimacy . . . . It isn’t a sign of victory. I’ll tell you that.”