Washington Wednesday: Funding that comes with strings

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 23rd of April.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up, a fight over federal money in higher education, and why it’s not as new as it sounds.

Harvard is taking the Trump administration to court over billions in federal grant money.

EICHER: For those who’ve been through battles like this before, the conflict feels familiar. WORLD’s Washington Bureau Reporter Leo Briceno has the story.

LEO BRICENO: Harvard’s lawsuit is new, but the concern behind it isn’t.

Back in 1984, the Christian liberal arts school Grove City College faced a similar ultimatum: agree to all present and future government regulations, or forgo all federal aid for students.

The school’s current Vice President of Student Recruitment Lee Wishing was a student when the college took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court.

LEE WISHING: It was really a power grab by the federal government—and the Supreme Court said it was a power grab…

The case itself was about women’s access to education. The government wanted Grove City to sign a form that promised to follow government regulations about equal access to education. And although Grove City already firmly held that conviction, its leaders worried the government would make more demands down the road the college could not agree to.

WISHING: So we didn’t sign this form because we didn’t want to end up in a position where the feds would control us—and by the way, at the time there were something like 7,000 sections of the code of federal regulations that followed federal student aid.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the government’s authority didn’t extend to the whole college—but did extend to the department that would be receiving the funds. Grove City then decided it would not accept federally funded student aid.

WISHING: That case was sitting there for all of higher ed to see that if you take federal money, there are strings attached.

That relationship between the federal government and higher ed started roughly in the 1860’s through land grants—holdings of land sold to fund places of education. These would be used to fund colleges like Texas A&M University and the University of California. Then after World War II, the government upped its investment in higher education, largely through research grants.

Here’s Ethan Schrum, Director of the humanities program at Azusa Pacific University in California.

ETHAN SCHRUM: What they did during the war was they typically funded these large centers—the grad lab at MIT that worked on radar, the underwater sound lab at San Diego managed by the University of California that worked on sonar; these kinds of centers, dedicated to specific war-related technologies.

Student aid was a different story.

SCHRUM: That didn’t get started in a very major form until the middle of the 1960s with the higher education act that was a part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And then a few years later in the early 1970s we got Pell grants.

The government’s involvement in grants has since expanded. So has its role in student loans.

According to the Education Data Initiative, federal loans represent 92 percent of all student debt. In the 2023-’24 school year, the government issued $114 billion dollars in new loans.

But not all students take federal aid.

ALBA PADRON: I read the email at the beginning of the hallway and I wasn’t even halfway through the hallways when I connected the dots that this was actually possible.

Alba Isabel Blanco Padron is a student at Hillsdale College in Michigan—one of the colleges that doesn’t take any federal assistance. She’s studying philosophy. Because she immigrated to the United States from Venezuela, she’s not eligible for many of the forms of aid the government offers.

Alba instead receives private assistance. She remembers learning late one night about the scholarships that made her college dream possible.

PADRON: I think I ran to the end of the hallway to tell like literally anyone that was awake but it was also like 1:30 a.m. in the morning.

Alba thinks that bringing in funding from private sources fosters a sense of purposefulness from donors and humility from recipients.

PADRON: So I think because it doesn’t receive any money from a big institution, people are more willing to act and support the mission themselves.

Alba—and Hillsdale—are the exception. By and large, the government’s increasing role in the education landscape has become harder to avoid.

Here’s Wishing again, the vice president of student recruitment from Grove City College. I asked him if he’s surprised more colleges don’t forgo federal dollars.

WISHING: They really can’t afford to. It’s very difficult for colleges to pull out. They’re really dependent on that aid. The longer they’ve been taking the money, the more difficult it is to pull out.

In many cases, federal funding is a fruitful relationship for colleges and universities, even for conservative ones. Such is the case at Cedarville University—a Christian university in Ohio that does take federal dollars.

THOMAS WHITE: One of the examples of the reasons why we do that is because that allows us to then do our center for cyber operations that we have.=

That’s Thomas White, president of Cedarville. He says federal aid the school received from the National Science Foundation helped the school play a leading role in that field.

WHITE: Our center for cyber operations is one of 20 or so schools in the nation that’s considered a center of academic excellence in cyber operations… And so to be able to do that wouldn’t be possible without some funding from the NSF.

That said, White says Cedarville has plans to back out of federal funding if it’s ever asked to cross a bright red line.

WHITE: If the government starts requiring that you have teachers of other faiths or if you have to accept students of other faiths at a Christian institution that has a clearly-defined line for faculty to sign their doctrinal statement or for believers to have a testimony as a believer in Christ, then at that point you have to walk away.

Others believe the government’s relationship with higher education has become something the founders of the country probably didn’t envision. Constitutional attorney Michael Farris founded Patrick Henry College in 2000. The school has not accepted any federal funding along the way. Farris envisions a fairly minimal relationship between federal authorities and higher education.

MICHAEL FARRIS: That some federal officials occasionally attend football and basketball games at the alma-mater. I’m not satisfied with the shoe being on the other foot, I want them out of the shoe business.

Instead, the federal government is still very much in the shoe business. The Trump administration is asking Harvard to adhere to a list of demands that includes viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring, governance and leadership reforms, changes to its disciplinary practices for students, and quarterly reporting through the end of 2028.

Harvard says the Trump administration’s actions are inconsistent with the First Amendment, and calls the withholding of grants “unlawful.” In its filing, the school said it would not “surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”

It’s now up to the courts to decide who pulls the strings.

That’s it for Washington Wednesday. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno.

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